Hacker News Reader

Comment by pier25 | Hacker News Reader

This is going to be controversial... but if Apple is going to choose a Spanish word for a _very popular_ product name, they should at least pick one that is properly written.

Monterrey in Spanish is written with 2 Rs.

Yes, I know the city in California is spelled with just a single R. Its original name was actually "Puerto de Monterrey". It probably changed to a single R when Mexico sold California (and other territories) to the US in the mid 1800s.

Edit:

See, told you this would offend US sensibilities.

View on HN

They didn't choose a Spanish word. They chose a city name. It is spelled correctly - in regards to the city name.

Indeed, but my point is that, considering there are more native Spanish speakers in the world than English native speakers, it would have been a good idea to pick another word.

Edit:

Imagine a super popular Mexican company had chosen "Niu York" as the name of one of the most popular software products in the world. Wouldn't that bother you?

Does your hypothetical Mexican company have an established pattern of naming its products after cities in Mexico? And, in this scenario, is there an actual city in Mexico called "Niu York"?

> Indeed, but my point is that, considering there are more native Spanish speakers in the world than English native speakers, it would have been a good idea to pick another word.

AFAIK “Monterrey”, “Monte Rey”, and “Monterey” are all alternate spellings from the Spanish-speaking world of “Monterrei”, the place name in Galicia from which many uses of the name (including the California place name) come, often (again, as in the California case) with personal titles of nobility as intermediaries.

> Imagine a super popular Mexican company had chosen "Niu York" as the name of one of the most popular software products in the world. Wouldn't that bother you?

Well, if I cared about the company or product, it might bother me a little that they failed to get the usual Spanish version of the place name (Nueva York) right, which most Spanish uses, including in product names, tend to use. But probably not even that, no. Maybe mildly amused.

I feel the name "Niu York" is OK to me, but it is only my opinion (so not a "fact"). In fact, I feel it's better than a Mexican company named one of the most popular software products in the world as "New York".

But why stop there? The Spanish name is just a couple of badly spelled Latin words ("montem" + "regem"). And guess what? The Latin words are just some mispronounced Proto-Indo-European words.

Clearly Apple should have called it Men-h₃rḗǵs, right?

Because neither Latin or Indo-European are the second language in the world with most native speakers.

Maybe you should petition the city of Monterey to change its name. And while you're at it, do the same for every other city in the world with a name that has changed slightly over time.

By the way, does it bother you at all that "Mexico" isn't properly spelled? Or is that OK because there aren't enough native speakers of Nahuatl to make a case for "Mēxihco"?

You are being facetious, but there was in fact a decades-long (maybe centuries-long) debate within the Spanish Royal Academy as to whether the correct spelling for the country should be "Mejico" rather than "Mexico". In some places even today a spelling of "Mejico" is used (not in Mexico itself, of course), reflecting the previous advice given by the Academy.

It wasn't until the late 20th century that the Royal Academy finally conceded that the standard spelling of Mexico should be with an X. This accommodation, however, was made begrudgingly, as you can tell perhaps by reading between the lines of their official position on the matter:

https://www.rae.es/dpd/M%C3%A9xico

https://www.rae.es/dpd/Texas

Spanish spelling is standardized in a way that is almost unimaginable in the English-speaking world today. The driving institution behind this standardization is the Royal Academy, which has influence not only in Spain, but also throughout Latin America. It would not be unprecedented at all for a city or province to change the spelling of its name in order to conform to Spanish's universal spelling rules.

"Monterey" may look wrong to a modern Spanish speaker, but Spanish spellings were not widely standardized until after the United States invaded and seized California from Mexico.

Rather than being a corruption of the original spelling, the current spelling of Monterey, California seems to be one of the variations in use locally at the time of the invasion.

> the current spelling of Monterey, California seems to be one of the variations in use locally at the time of the invasion

Seems unlikely as the /rr/ sound and orthography comes from the Latin, before Spanish even existed.

This German map from 1850 seems to spell it "Monterey", although it's a little hard to make out.

https://history.utah.gov/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/Radefeld...

This American map published at the time of the Mexican-American war labels it "Monterey B."

https://history.utah.gov/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/Mitchell...

This American map published before the war also labels it "Monterey B."

https://mapgeeks.org/wp-content/uploads/1845-Map-of-Californ...

Here's a map produced by a British cartographer showing the spelling to be "Puerto de Monterey" in 1745:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_California#/media/F...

This 1650 Dutch map seems to spell it "Monterey", although the handwriting is archaic and a little bit difficult to interpret:

https://www.wdl.org/en/item/2661/view/1/1/

Perhaps most convincingly, this Spanish map published in Madrid in 1802 documents a 1603 expedition, one of the first to navigate the California coast. It uses the spelling "Puerto de Monte Rey".

https://digitalcommons.csumb.edu/hornbeck_spa_1_a/22/

None of which is to say that the "Monterrey" spelling wasn't used. The following English-language map from 1838 uses the "proper" Spanish spelling:

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/ac/Californ...

I'm sure there are plenty of other examples using a spelling of "Monterrey" as well.

I'm from Europe and I don't care about US sensibilities, but I find your post petty and the idea behind it doesn't make sense.

There is basically no place on the entire planet that has never changed its name. Big Sur, Catalina, Mavericks, those places used to be called something else, too.

The question on everyone's mind, why didn't Apple make the spelling the way that it was when Mexico sold California in the mid 1800s?

You're missing my point.

I'm not saying should have used the original name, but rather that it should have picked a different location.

The recent Mac OS releases are all named after places in California, so the spelling seems consistent here.

Native Spanish speaker, Latino here. I honestly couldn’t care less.

Monterey isn’t a word, it’s a name. It’s written correctly.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com