Isn't this essentially telling other languages how they're supposed to work?
It's not really different from the Maharashtran givernment deciding to write Bombay as "Mumbai" in English (which is how my grandfather pronounced it even when speaking English).
Unaddressed in the essay is how the construct SURNAME given_name (e.g. BREL Jaques) is quite common in countries like France -- not used in social conversation but in all official contexts including work and school. And let's not forget "Bond, James Bond."
The "communitarian/individualist" split and even more so its onomastic implication is overrated IMHO as you can see from my French example above.
I suppose this sort of thing instantly confuses me - why aren't we already calling the city München if that is what the Germans are doing?
https://www.citymetric.com/horizons/which-european-cities-ha...
One fun fact in there: there's a town in Bulgaria called Plovdiv, but the Italians call it Philipoppoli - and they've been calling it that since long, long before it was called Plovdiv!
That topic has so much missed potential. He admits he left off Venice, but what about Aachen/Aix-la-Chapelle, a historical town if there ever was one. Most of his examples are just different languages changing spelling to fit their conventions (eg Italian names ending in -o). But it totally overlooks pronunciation (Paris is totally different in French and English). It would be much more interesting to understand why cities sound different in different languages, for example London in English and Londres in French--why did they add they add the r sound to that word?
I heard about Durres, Albania, for the first time today, too.
I had wondered about a connection between door, Germanic \dorz, Latin forum* and port, porta, portal before (Latin f frequently corresponds to English d, e.g. inferior, En under).
Suppose -dres for Londres once meant port, which is always a good guess for any bigger city's name. I can't confirm it though.
Durres derives from Dorian Greek Durrhakhion, but Greek has thura for "door"; so if I'm correct, they would have loaned the form with d. Ironically, Albanian dere "door" has a homophone "bitter; difficult, tiresome" (from a different root if akin to Greek due "misery") and one traditional explanation of Albanias means difficult coast (although there was a historical kingdom Albania far off from the coast).
By the way: It's Londer in Albanian, too, and Londres in many Romance languages.
tl;dr: nobody really knows, and the first address for French etymology doesn't explain Londres either
Judging by Italian wikipedia, Filippopoli, which makes much more etymological sense.
I wonder what the Italians think of this:
> The city has historically developed on seven syenite hills, some of which are 250 metres (820 feet) high. Because of these hills, Plovdiv is often referred to in Bulgaria as "The City of the Seven Hills".
I recall a story but I'm not sure of its authenticity, it described western traders asking portuguese translators to give them the pronunciation of 日本 (Nihon/Nippon the native word for Japan). The PT translators interpreted the characters through Mandarin and come out with "Jipangu" which would be the root etymology for our english term "Japan".
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E6%97%A5%E6%9C%AC#Pronunciat...
If Mandarin had been involved, we'd call Japan something like Arben (Riben) in English.
You mean, what the Deutsche are doing :) Why stop at the city level?
(I just now notice that a sincere implementation of this effort would require adding some diacritics to the German writing system to accomodate the Saxonian dialect.)
The name of the city is derived from the Old/Middle High German term Munichen, meaning "by the monks".
The city state of Monaco is also called Monaco in Italian. Both the English and the Italian names are derived from the Greek word Monoikos, meaning "single house".
The German city of München is called Monaco in Italian and Monacum/Monachium in Latin. The Italian name derives from the Latin name, which in turn is derives from the Latin word for monk.
To avoid confusion, the German city is more commonly referred to as "Monaco di Baviera" (Monaco of Bavaria) to better differentiate it from the microstate.
Pointing that it’s common in other cultures weakens the article’s argument that “East Asians put their family name first because family affiliation was traditionally the most important information about a person, the individual identity coming second.”
For comparison, consider the loan word in English, "Sushi". No one in English would consider calling it by the name "Raw Fish and Rice" because the term "Sushi" implies a specific cultural context and carries the connection to Japan, Japanese culture and history etc. Trying to take the word "Sushi" away from the concept of "Sushi" would be almost rude, as it is de-valuing the social context that it is connected with.
By comparison, at the moment, East Asian people typically re-order their names to fit Western norms in Western contexts, which by the the opposite token implies that the name ordering isn't that important, and doesn't carry any significance to the person who wears the name. Deciding to use the traditional ordering isn't about telling other languages how they're supposed to work, it's about asking other people to acknowledge your cultural context as legitimate and equal to their own.
The decision to do this now may well, in this case, be steeped in nationalist sentiment as the article implies.
To me it seems like a better idea is to promulgate the convention of uppercasing the English family name in contexts where different name orders are likely to appear. I believe I have seen that convention on TV broadcasts of the Olympics, and it seems like a good idea.
As mentioned in the article, only the Japanese do this. (Well, Hungarians do too, but they're not even West Asian.) East Asians except for the Japanese do not reorder their names. Normal practice for a Chinese person would be to use an English name in English contexts.