The irony of using 'Z' in the title.
It's our language; you broke it.
this post was submitted on 16 Apr 2025
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Oh, lol, I am sorry, Americanised. We did break it. Or they did.
All good!
As a 华裔-American, I agree, we should just use all the true names of places.
I mean, what kind of a name is "China"?
Its 中国, officially 中华人民共和国.
So... lets use the real names, shall we?
This is what class would sound like:
"Alright kids, it's time to learn about countries. As you know, Zhōnghuá Rénmín Gònghéguó¹ is one of the largest guó jiā² in the world...
Xiāng Gǎng³ is a tè bié xíng zhèng qū⁴ that has de jure autonomy. Just like guǎng zhōu⁵, and the rest of guǎng dōng shěng⁶, people generally speak guǎng dōng huà⁷ (aka: yuè yǔ⁸), as a fāng yán⁹..."
You get the idea. (The "I agree" part at the beginning is sarcastic)
I bet like 90% of the Western world has trouble even hearing the words with the tones. Tonal languages is very difficult to learn, I only know how to speak a bit because I was born into it, even I have trouble with words, since I grew up in the US, I haven't spoken Mandarin in over a decade, and only still use the basics words of Cantonese at home (since political conversations is just a one-sided conversation, with parents spewing propaganda, not even worth talking about).
If I hear people attemping to use the native (non-Anglicanized) pronounciation and absolutely butcher it, I'm gonna feel so much 尴尬/cringe. (Sorry, I just feel like people are mocking me when they try to say 你好 (Hello) since the Tones feel so "off")
Edit:
Translations in case you were confused:
- ¹ People's Republic of China
- ² Country
- ³ Hong Kong
- ⁴ Special Administrative Region
- ⁵ Guang Zhou (City)
- ⁶ Guang Dong Province
- ⁷ "Guang Dong" Language (commonly known as "Cantonese")
- ⁸ "Yue" Language (another name for "Cantonese)
- ⁹ Dialect (technically, Cantonese is a Language, but they didn't have a flag and an army... so... 🤷♂️)
I think in this case, it's the proper nouns that should be used. If we learned it as Zhōnghuá Rénmín Gònghèguò (or at least whichever part of that translates to "China"), it wouldn't be too bad. There's not much point in also using the Cantonese versions of "country", "language", etc., since most languages have their own analogue for these concepts
Zhōngguò is sufficient
But that feels like saying "America"
Feels un-serious and insincere for a history / social studies class.
And technically, there is still another state with the similar name (Republic of China/中华民国), so you need the full name to clarify.
This thread is full of people who think English is the only language in the world. Its not, every language calls places with their own fashion, often different from how they are called natively. Its just how stuff works when in a country people simply don't speak the "other" language and don't share the same sounds either.
Calling the places with their original spelling will only create confusion because in that language, that place has a different name.
Its called translations and its how languages work, get over it.
What?
In my language we use our names for places. Like London or Paris, we have local language names. For less known places we use the original name, like New York or Birsbane.
Most important is when the name has historical importance for our culture, we most probably have a localized name for it, otherwise we don't.
And no, we don't use the "american" names at all
Its cultural, nothing regarding respect.
It would be helpful to know where you are from.
Would it make a difference?
Its not an English speaking country and its in Europe.
My point stand true for all major European languages like French, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese and many more.
My native language is directly derived from Latin and we have a very interleaved history with all Eu countries.
I am using English here because this is an English community.
Just curious
First of all, all languages do this to an extent. Singling out America or English seems pointless to me.
Geographical names are a nonsensical construct of traditions, conventions, and misunderstandings. Why shouldn't a language come up with names that suit their tongue? Why shouldn't they go with whatever becomes consensus in their language? Being correct is overall less important than being understood. And that's being understood by your peers, not the people on the other end of the world.
With place names it's often old conflicts and historical differences that prevent adoption of modern place names. English is one of the few languages that made the change from Peking to Beijing, others didn't want to be told "by the commies" what to call the city. People who were fighting Napoleon 200+ years ago still call Nice in France by its Italian name Nizza, the name of the city in circulation prior to the French takeover. Out of principle. Europe, where the spoken common language variety is greater than in North America, is more used to this and people just know Brussels can also be Brussel, Brüssel, or Bruxelles. It's like the imperial system of measurements: it makes no effing sense but it works.
If you argue respect you're going to hit a massive wall with some languages. Mandarin Chinese is fresh in my mind that has very colorful names for all the places of the world that often have little or nothing in common with what the locals call it. Meiguo for America? Is that disrespectful? No, when you learn that this sort of means beautiful country. And it would take ages to get English speakers onto the same page calling China Zhongguo. And I'm quite sure the locals of Zhongguo would not understand the average American Joe saying it. So what would be gained by making that switch?
Turkey wanted to change its English name because they don't like the association with the eponymous bird. If the bird was commonly referred to as something else, and English wasn't the lingua franca of the world, this would not have come up. Other languages have stuck with their version of Türkiye. And for the English speaking world I see an uphill battle for this to catch on. People only switched to Kyiv out of spite for Russian bombs. People are still going to say Turkey and not mean the bird. Same is true for recent gulf name changes.
English is half filled with loanwords. Dejavu maybe just stands out to you. Parliament, pork, and necessary maybe not so much. I think all can be traced back via Norman French or later. All languages borrow words. Many of them change meaning and/or spelling after being borrowed. This is normal.
All of the things you complained about seem perfectly alright to me. You're looking for a fight with a windmill.
Now, I can understand that. Thank you.
Since you mentioned Chinese, there's also an interesting thing in languages that have Chinese characters as their writing system origin and use names based on it (Chinese languages of course, Japanese, Korean and I think also Vietnamese) where names of historical or important people are translated via their written form and not their pronunciation. For example, the Japanese prime minister Ishiba Shigeru 石破茂 is called 石破茂 (shí pò mào) in Mandarin, written with the same characters. (Been a while since I read about this so I forgot the examples where the name is pronounced significantly different and in all of these languages but this is a good enough example)
why did they decide
Nobody sat down and made a decision to handle country names the way we do. It organically happened the way it did for no particular reason other than it works well enough.
why don’t we change everything back to how the countries’ place names are pronounced by their citizens out of respect
Nobody cares enough to undertake this. I don't particularly care that people call the US by different names in their languages. People in Turkey aren't asking us to pronounce their country's name the same way they do. Most people are happy to apply the inverse golden rule on this, i.e., I don't pronounce your country's name the way you do, so I'm not going to expect you to pronounce my country's name the way I do.
Would it make things harder or would it allow us to grow?
Yes, but I think it would be a lot of work for not much growth. You don't learn a lot about a place by just pronouncing its name differently.
Nobody sat down and made a decision to handle country names the way we do.
This is clearly false. There was a definite point at which it was decided to call Burma Myanmar, or at a more local level Peking to Beijing.
Those were decisions to change the specific names of specific places, not a decision to handle country names in the general way OP was describing.
There were certain decisions made to specifically deviate from what had developed organically. These are the exception.
That's called exonyms, and in part are a natural consequence of some language speakers not being able to reproduce some sounds of other languages.
You could call Georgia Sakartvelo, or Morocco Almaghrib, for example, but many would struggle with the tv or the gh. Or the s in Mesr for Egypt, which isn't actually an s like the English speakers know it.
And what would you call Switzerland? There are three official languages.
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