Comment by robga | Hacker News Reader

Comment by robga | Hacker News Reader

The UK government is changing the full name ('State Title') only, not the short name ('Country Name'). The UK gov follows the standards set by the Permanent Committee on Geographical Names for British Official Use. This body includes the BBC, Royal Geographical Society, etc. So I suppose the BBC will continue to use Turkey.

"Turkey; Republic of Turkey changed to Turkey; Republic of Türkiye"

https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/country-names/cou...

https://www.gov.uk/government/groups/the-permanent-committee...

There is the precedent of Burma/Myanmar, "Country name remains Burma reflecting common British English usage". Similarly for Cabo Verde, "Cape Verde had circulated a request for this form to be used, though UK has retained the common English usage for the country name".

However, it did recently change Swaziland to Eswatini and I know which one I'd vote for as being common usage.

The ISO codes are not always adopted verbatim. e.g. The UK gov list does not include Taiwan. ISO plays both sides, giving it a country code but calling it a province of China. On the other hand the UK does include Kosovo which is not an ISO country but is recognised as one by approx 50% of nations including the UK.

Other countries have similar national naming committees to the UK's PCGN, you can see a list here https://unstats.un.org/unsd/ungegn/nna/nna-committees/

Reminds me of Ivory Coast insisting that everyone call it Côte d'Ivoire, or even the "Republic of Côte d'Ivoire".

Sure, fine, whatever. Everyone deserves to be called by their preferred name. I find it weird though, because every country has a respectful exonym, so a direct translation doesn't seem wrong, and mixing languages seems even weirder.

I don't know why personal names don't typically get translated, but country names do, so this is not a hill worth dying on. It's just odd to me, especially since they are sticking with the colonial name instead of changing to some indigenous name.

Personal names will sometimes be translated - depending on when the person moved or decided to present as.

I know of Indian colleagues who go by an English-sounding name that is at least somewhat close to their actual name. Others have anglicized a spelling that is phonetically close.

The main difference is that you can ask them what they prefer as they’re right there.

It’s harder to ask an entire country.

> Personal names will sometimes be translated - depending on when the person moved or decided to present as.

E.g. https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isabel_II_del_Reino_Unido

Or Cristoforo Colombo, aka Christopher Columbus

Historically it's more common than not. E.g. most names of European monarchs are translated.

Popes too. Pope John Paul II was Jan Pawel II in his native Poland, Giovanni Paolo in Italy, and so forth. Pope Francis is Francesco in Italian and Francisco in his native Spanish.

If a Pope has one most proper name, it would have to be his name in Latin: Ioannes Paulus II, Benedictus XVI, Franciscus.

Certainly.

I was recently reading a Spanish newspaper that referred to Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Harry as Isabel and Enrique.

It was a little surprising since I’ve only ever seen the Spanish kings referred to as Juan Carlos and Felipe in English-language media, never by translations.

My middle name is Olivier, by in English for a while I just translated it to Oliver.

I had a Chinese professor named “Da Ren”, but because his name was transliterated as “Daren”, he would just go as Daren for nonchinese, due to the collision.

Anglicised spelling are probably often due to a change from a local alphabet to the one I'm using now.

City names also get translated, but not regions / provinces. It’s all so arbitrary, probably mostly for historical reasons.

My own nationality (and perhaps yours, judging by your username?) comes to mind, Dutch, which doesn’t even vaguely resemble the way we refer to ourselves (“Nederlands”), but is close to a very old naming of a region in our country (“Diets”, ca. 1200 - 1550), how we call Germans (“Duits”), who call themselves different as well (“Deutsch”), where the word “German” probably stems from Germanic, which refers to a historical group of people in Central and Scandinavian Europe, comparable to “Latin”.

Well.. Tuscany, Apulia, Lombardy, Sicily, Sardinia, Piedmont. Where did you find that regions don't get translated?

Mmm I had some French regions in mind, which typically don’t get translated in my own language at all (eg Côte d’Azure), but I just realized we do translate Pyrenées to “Pyreneeën” and there are probably many other examples as well.

We also translate Paris to Parijs, and Lille has an official translation to Rijsel but nobody uses that.

Sheesh if this were a codebase it would raise some serious questions about variable naming standards.

Costa azzurra in Italian, apparently.

Pretty sure we had several posts on HM related to the weirdness of translations for names.

But there are cities like Denver. Luckier than others, in that respect ;)

And Amsterdam, but TIL Rome is called Roma in Italian. :)

Just fyi., Dutch, Deutsch, Diets etc. are derived from Proto-Germanic *þiudiskaz (“of the people, popular”)[1]

[1]: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/deutsch

Finnish spells California as Kalifornia, translates e.g. North Dakota to Pohjois-Dakota, Hawaii is Havaiji, and so on. Regions do get translated too, but not as often.

It's a question of "how often do we need to mention this name"; only commonly mentioned get a translation or familiar-alphabet-munging.

Other countries needing to talk about provinces is more rare.

me omw to go demand that people call us The United States of America in spanish instead of estados unidos

like if people really gonna apply this standard they better do it consistently.

You mean, in Español

Footnote- there's a very practical reason that personal names are not typically translated: address, i.e. speaking to people or calling to them.

If you're attempting to call to somebody using a translated name, such a person might not recognize and respond to the name, unless they've had considerable time to adjust to it.

On the other hand, one is typically not walking around shouting a country's name to get its attention.

This is not a hard and fast rule, and the translation of personal names has a complex and somewhat sordid history, but there's your short answer.

On the other hand, the variance from countries to cities, provinces, etc... well... I have nothing to offer on that mystery.

Place names get translated when they become widely used in another language, this is because most "native" names often don't fit with the phonology of another language or the character set. It's particularly awkward for Turkey to insist on this name change because most languages don't actually have an "ü" letter so foreigners don't know how to pronounce it or type it on a computer.

Imagine if Bavarians insisted that everybody refer to their capital as "München".

Some people do translate their personal names. In china it's common for people to pick "english names" for interactions with foreigners in part because foreigners have huge problems pronouncing native names.

> There is the precedent of Burma/Myanmar, "Country name remains Burma reflecting common British English usage".

Myanmar has the much bigger problem that it has no adjectival form, requiring even the most politically correct people to use "Burmese".

(Technically, that's not true - the official adjectival form, according to Myanmar, should be "Myanma". Good luck getting English speakers to understand that.)

> Technically, that's not true - the official adjectival form, according to Myanmar, should be "Myanma". Good luck getting English speakers to understand that.

How is that any harder than Afghanistan => Afghan.

I can think of two ways:

First, many English-speakers are familiar with -stan, which is used in seven different country names, plus some region names.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/-stan

For most of these, you can get an ethnonym or demonym by removing -stan or -istan.

Second, the -ar in particular has a lot of trouble with non-rhotic English accents, where "Myanmar" might already be pronounced the same as "Myanma"!

> Second, the -ar in particular has a lot of trouble with non-rhotic English accents, where "Myanmar" might already be pronounced the same as "Myanma"!

It's supposed to be. Both names, "Burma" and "Myanmar", are formed under the assumption that your English pronunciation is non-rhotic.

The same is true of the common Korean surname "Park", which does not contain any R-like sound. British spellings of foreign words really cause tremendous damage to the pronunciations used by rhotic speakers.

> British spellings of foreign words really cause tremendous damage to the pronunciations used by rhotic speakers.

It's such a strange thing to use an 'r' to modify the sound of the preceding vowel, and it's not even as if it's 100% consistent, because all English is a mess.

This expectation also leads to comical situations like the typical British pronunciation of "pasta". I guess the Italians should have spelled it parsta.

Got a source for your "typical British pronunciation" of "pasta" being non-Italian? I read your comment as asserting that typical Brits pronounce it as "par-sta" with a non-rhotic 'r', but I don't think I've ever heard anyone except the Australian John Torode pronounce it that way.

> I read your comment as asserting that typical Brits pronounce it as "par-sta" with a non-rhotic 'r'

That is exactly the opposite of what TillE wrote. If that were how the British already pronounced the word, there would be no need to change the spelling.

> Got a source for your "typical British pronunciation" of "pasta" being non-Italian?

This is just infantile. You can verify the pronunciation yourself in any number of ways.

https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/pasta (UK pronunciation: /ˈpæs.tə/)

https://youglish.com/pronounce/pasta/english/uk , if you want audio samples.

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/pasta#Pronunciation (UK pronunciation: /ˈpæstə/)

For fun, get your English-accented acquaintances to pronounce "drawing".

Officially, the Queen's English says this is pronounced "drawing". But most Brits feel compelled to insert an R, "drawRing".

It is much like Americans saying "Mel and I", in object context, e.g. "She accused Mel and I", where "Mel and me" would have been right.

> But most Brits feel compelled to insert an R, "drawRing".

They really are compelled to insert an R there. That is one of the phonological rules of their variety of English; it's how you avoid running one vowel into another vowel.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linking_and_intrusive_R

Complaining about this is the equivalent of complaining about how Americans "feel" compelled to insert a vowel into the name Gbagbo, pronouncing it guh-bagbo. They don't just feel compelled; that is a genuine requirement of their language.

It is not at all similar to any variation on "Mel and I", which is an artificial rule that English speakers must be taught in school. The form people use naturally is "me and Mel".

No. If you had been correct, there would have been no reason to post what I did. But you are 100% wrong on both counts, and I did. (For amusement, see rndmio's comment above.)

I think you're referring to

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypercorrection

while thaumasiotes is referring to

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonotactics

There are examples in the hypercorrection article about people adding an /h-/ in a very similar situation, so what you describe clearly can happen. But are you sure that the R example falls into that category?

It seems to be a distinction about how conscious the change is, or at what layer of language it happens. Isn't that an empirical question that could be tested?

Strictly speaking, the masses adopting rhotic pronunciation was, originally, an effort at mimicking a privileged-class affectation. The extra "R" in "drawRing" did not mimic anything, though, but seemed required by the imperfectly deduced rule. Those in actual contact with the privileged class had plenty of examples to, er*, draw upon, denied to those without.

Class markers in speech are always a moving target, a sort of low-grade arms race: low stakes for the upper class, high stakes for lower.

So, pronouncing it "drawRing" is a lower-class marker, similar in a way to "aks" for "ask" in American English.

As always, all of these pronunciations are legitimate and produce no misunderstanding.

[*] "er" is pronounced "uh" or "eh", rhotically.

> As always, all of these pronunciations are legitimate and produce no misunderstanding.

I'm sorry but pretty much everyone who grew up with English as a second language would like to disagree.

Hearing "drawRing" to this day throws me off -- I have to repeat the noise to myself internally to make sure I understood it right.

> I'm sorry but pretty much everyone who grew up with English as a second language would like to disagree.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but their opinion doesn't count.

Foreign speakers have no say in what's legitimate and may be confused by absolutely anything.

If you wish to argue that, I'd suggest you guard your absolute clauses a bit more carefully, as they now suddenly aren't absolute. You said "produce no misunderstanding", I demonstrated that they do.

There are now many, many more foreign speakers of English than native. They definitely have had and are having an effect, collectively, on how the language evolves.

> It is much like Americans saying "Mel and I", in object context, e.g. "She accused Mel and I", where "Mel and me" would have been right. ...

> It is not at all similar to any variation on "Mel and I", which is an artificial rule that English speakers must be taught in school. The form people use naturally is "me and Mel".

I think you're misunderstanding here. There's no situation where "she accused (Mel and) I" works. It's not taught in school. It happens because of people "hyper correcting" to match the inverted sentence. "(Mel and) I accused her" which they get corrected to use by the teacher when they say "(Mel and) me accused her".

I'm not misunderstanding anything.

> There's no situation where "she accused (Mel and) I" works.

That is true.

> It happens because of people "hyper correcting" to match the inverted sentence. "(Mel and) I accused her" which they get corrected to use by the teacher

That is also true. But your own example is telling you that there is also no situation where "Mel and I accused her" works. Sentences in that form do not naturally occur in English; they must be taught in school. The correct form would be "Me and Mel accused her".

Intrusive R isn't like that. It is a feature of the language, not something dictated to speakers by a formal education system.

100% wrong, again.

You like saying that, but so far you've shown no evidence that you have any idea what you're talking about.

Compare the article on intrusive R I linked before:

> This is now common enough in parts of England that, by 1997, the linguist John C. Wells considered it objectively part of Received Pronunciation, though he noted that it was still stigmatized as an incorrect pronunciation, as it is or was in some other standardized non-rhotic accents. Wells writes that at least in RP, "linking /r/ and intrusive /r/ are distinct only historically and orthographically".[17]

Where footnote 17 cites a paper from 1982.

You even cite proof that you are wrong.

What exactly do you think you're saying?

John C. Wells has patiently explained to you that intrusive-R pronunciation, while not expected of anyone, is (mostly) not considered to require correction, or to reliably unmask a bounder.

And what does that have to do with my comments?

It means not only are you 100% wrong, you also resist education.

> The correct form would be "Me and Mel accused her".

No it isn't. You'd never say "Me accused her". If you don't like the inversion its perfectly fine to say "I and Mel accused her", but using "me" for the subject is never correct.

> but using "me" for the subject [within a coordinated subject] is never correct.

Why do you believe this?

Because it is true.

If you believe otherwise, you are tragically misinformed and miseducated.

Using "me" in subject context is, besides being wrong, a social low-class marker. It does not come naturally to English speakers; it only ever occurs through exposure to the misuse.

I'm a bit skeptical of this overall, but it's obviously complicated to get data that filter out the effects of sociolectal solidarity. (Can you get people to speak "naturally" but without priming them to speak or to avoid speaking in a particular register or sociolect!?)

There are well-known phenomena like

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attraction_(grammar)

which can become conventionalized and eventually part of native speakers' intuitions even though they can be contrary to a more logically consistent or simpler understanding of agreement.

> Using "me" in subject context is, besides being wrong, a social low-class marker. It does not come naturally to English speakers

This is not even a theoretical possibility. There are no low-class markers that don't come naturally, because no one is going to make an effort to present themselves as low-class.

It takes obvious effort to overcome received habits from one's local idiolect, as for example underclass people did in England, last century, deliberately adopting an (imperfectly reproduced version of) the overclass rhotic affectation in an attempt at economic advancement.

You are getting really disingenuous, now. Who are you performing for?

Not the OP, but the alternative requires that either:

- "Me fail English." is considered to be a well formed construction, or that...

- ...adding a conjunction is important in determining whether "I" or "Me" is should be used.

It's just not the case that either of those are true in standard English.

While, in theory, you can have any rule you want within some sub-dialect, that would be a very strange rule indeed.

> Officially, the Queen's English says this is pronounced "drawing". But most Brits feel compelled to insert an R, "drawRing".

Am British, literally no one I know personally puts an extra R in when pronouncing drawing. I have heard it said that way before but you certainly couldn’t say that “most” Brits do it.

Apparently, "most" of some poorly characterized strata of Brits.

I am amused that your sibling comment insists "drawRing" is correct British pronunciation.

But Brits can't pronounce their own words properly half the time, in English! Ask a Brit to pronounce "drawing" - you'll get "drawring" back.

Source: expat living in Britain

I believe it's called the intrusive 'r'. The upside of it is that it makes the following joke work:

What do you call a one-eyed dinosaur? A dyathinkhesawus. Without the intrusive 'r' this joke would not work.

I moaned about this on https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/317198/the-r-sou.... Some good answers to the linked dupe.

Did not know about that discussion. As a "rhotic" person it makes me wince but I accept different accents. In any chat that leans towards getting heavy on this I refer people to The (great) Proclaimers song: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=066oSmDRKPA

Wait, so it's not "Berm-uh" and "My-ahn-mar" ?

I didn't realize this, but Wikipedia says

> In Burmese, the pronunciation depends on the register used and is either Bama (pronounced [bəmà]) or Myamah (pronounced [mjəmà]).

That is, there is originally no R sound in either word in Burmese, as thaumasiotes clarified.

Lots of people replying based on what sound like personal preferences or language biases; I'm guessing the biggest reason, if this is accurate, is that no one ever asks and GP assumes no one will.

Not sure why people didn't just agree on -i. Qatar -> Qatari, Zanzibar -> Zanzibari, to me Myanmar -> Myanmari makes perfect sense to me.

The -i ending comes from Arabic which makes it seem a bit out of place in Myanmar (not to mention the obvious religious tension).

-ese, -ian, -an and -n all come from Latin via routes of varying directness, which is why they feel somewhat "neutral" in English (e.g. Congolese and Japanese both seem cromulent and not intrinsically African or Asian).

How did we arrive at Guamanian as the adjective for of Guam?

myanmarese maybe? or myanmarian? haha

> (e.g. Congolese and Japanese both seem cromulent and not intrinsically African or Asian)

I have faced questions from Chinese people about why only Asians receive an -ese suffix in English.

"Chinese" in English comes from Portuguese ("chinês"), who were some of the earliest Europeans there. -ês and -ese both come from the same Latin origin.

I hazard that words like Cantonese, etc., came either via the same route, or by back-formation to match the existing wider term "Chinese".

Interestingly, "Japanner" used to be another word for a Japanese person.

Swissi?

Austriai?

Norwayi?

I have heard the people of Myanmar referred to as “Myanese” many times, in English, in Thailand. Enough that I might guess it’ll establish itself, like Czech people being “from Czech” did in much of Europe (in English).

Czech people are usually referred in English as being from Czechia (if you don't wanna use the unwieldy Czech Republic)

Yeah, that’s what one might expect, given than “Czechia” is pretty close to some historical words for the area.

But it has not been my experience at all that Czechia was the “usual” word, at least among English speakers in Europe. Nor do I personally find it any less unwieldy than “Czech Republic” but that’s my bias.

Assuming you also speak from experience, is there any easy way to verify this?

I don’t mean the official name, I mean what people actually say in English when referring to the country a Czech comes from.

I have no experience of what English speakers say in Europe. My only option to refer to the country is "the Czech Republic", but the one Czech guy I've met did ask that people refer to the country as "Czech".

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