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0 pointsthrowawayboise4y ago0 comments

Do countries get to declare how their names are spelled in other languages?

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11 comments · 5 top-level

xunn00264y ago· 6 in thread

Excuse me? Of course! Do people get to declare their name and pronoun?

mortehu4y ago

If that's your whole reasoning I think "of course!" is an overstatement.

xunn00264y ago

HN really needs an /s every time.

throwawayboiseOP4y ago

So Germany really decided that its name in English is "Germany" and not "Deutchland"?

I always assumed those names originated externally.

zhoujianfu4y ago

I’m pretttttty sure it originates locally! Why would the U.S. tell China to call us “Meiguo”, and why would China listen?

clusterfish4y ago

People generally do not get to declare how their name is spelled in a foreign language. It's determined by the government issuing them the document containing their foreign-spelled name. (Depends on the country of course, but this is typical)

sofixa4y ago

Of course they do! For my Bulgarian papers i was asked to spell my name in latin script however i wanted, and when i moved to France I was asked how is my name spelled, and i could change it if i want to (e.g. if i had an s in my name between vowels, in French it'd be read as z; in that case i could have changed the spelling to have ss, which is always read as s).

bialpio4y ago

I'd say so. Czechia may offer a fairly recent example of name change.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Name_of_the_Czech_Republic#A...

_dain_4y ago

They do, but only because the English-speaking world is peculiarly susceptible to this sort of manipulation. It started with Burma->Myanmar and Peking->Beijing, something nobody should have taken seriously.

Nobody gets mad that Spaniards say "Londres" instead of London. It's funny how it's mostly despotic regimes that get so twisted up about these foreign linguistic matters.

stkdump4y ago

I think a country at least gets to decide what it calls itself in english. For example in official documents that they translate to english. Or what they teach in schools as the 'correct spelling'. Now if the rest of the world follows that is another question. Languages don't have owners.

rileyphone4y ago

I still refer to “Myanmar” by its true name, Burma!

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