Comment by gumby | Hacker News Reader

Comment by gumby | Hacker News Reader

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Well it's liker the German government saying that they will always write München even in English; that doesn't say anything about how English speakers (or German private citizens speaking English) might choose to refer to Munich. In Malaysia "Datuk" is used as a combined honorific with a name when speaking otherwise completely idiomatic English rather than being translated into "Sir So-and-so"

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.

> Well it's liker the German government saying that they will always write München even in English; that doesn't say anything about how English speakers (or German private citizens speaking English) might choose to refer to Munich.

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?

From Wikipedia:

The name of the city is derived from the Old/Middle High German term Munichen, meaning "by the monks".

The Italian name for München/Munich is Monaco (literally "monk"), which makes a lot of sense now :)

Which brings up the question, what is the Principality of Monaco called in Italian? To save you a guys a trip to Wikipedia:

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.

For the same reason German speakers say Wasser but English speakers say water. Words diverge over time.

Part of it is that language diverged, but it's also because if you're in country X talking about country Y and you have a long enough history you'll have a word in language X for country Y.

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".

Not Mandarin, but some unspecified southern dialect (probably Fujianese/Hokkien, where it's Jitpun).

If Mandarin had been involved, we'd call Japan something like Arben (Riben) in English.

The reconstructed Middle Chinese pronunciation for 日本 is /ȵiɪt̚ puən/. In some languages, such as Japanese, the ȵ became an n. In others, such as Mandarin, it denasalized to a fricative like ʐ̩ instead. The etymology for English "Japan" /dʒəˈpæn/ is apparently Portuguese "Japão" /ʒɐ.ˈpɐ̃w̃/ via Malay "Jepun" /d͡ʒəpon/, via Min Nan 日本 (Ji̍t-pún) /ʑit̚⁴⁻³² pun⁴¹/ which itself is probably a loan (using Min readings of the characters), since the Min languages split off the Chinese branch before 日本 came to be used for Japan.

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E6%97%A5%E6%9C%AC#Pronunciat...

Exonymy. Here's a lightweight survey of it in Europe:

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!

> but the Italians call it Philipoppoli

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".

Eh? Siebenbergen is in Czech I thought, or Tschechien as we call it.

There might be another one, but I was thinking of the more famous city built on seven hills, Rome.

Well, that was the ancient name of the city.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philippopolis_(Thrace)

Lightweight indeed. That article seemed so promising, and then it was just arbitrarily limited by its data (as the author admits but doesn't do anything to fix).

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 didn't know Londres.

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

> why aren't we already calling the city München if that is what the Germans are doing?

You mean, what the Deutsche are doing :) Why stop at the city level?

While we're on it, I demand that people stop saying Dresden. Over here, we call it more like Dräsdn, or somethings Dresdne.

(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.)

> 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

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.”

Frankly I don't care one way or another regarding the ordering, but as a method to unambiguously specify which name is which, regardless of order, I'm all for it.

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