How come we don't call Cologne Koln? Or Lisbon Lisboa?

[LAS14]

They are proper names. Shouldn't we use the name their inhabitants use? This has always puzzled me.

tia
las

[at140]

1. So long as they now call Bombay as Mumbai I am not going to

complain! LOL
So I agree that all cities and countries should be called what their inhabitants use.

[pangaia]

2. Nippon

[at140]

4. Yeah, stop calling it Japan, call it Nippon

Burma is now called Myanmar. Ceylon is now called Sri Lanka.
Japan should be called Nippon.

[pangaia]

20. South Korea--

Slightly more complicated

South Koreans generally say "Hanguk,"

Official name is "Daehan Minguk" -Republic of Korea

Of course then we have Italia, Deutschland, Suomi, Zhōngguó, -- it goes on forever.
And let us never, ever forget, OH Canada !

[A DAY IN THE LIFE]

26. And the United States is Meguk (NT)

x

[DFW]

21. Well, "Ni-hon" actually

If you're going to use the term in "Nihongo" (Japanese).

My sister-in-law is from Japan. She never says "Nippon," only "Ni-hon."

[fierywoman]

3. Germans call Milan "Mailand"; Italians call Paris "Parigi"; this goes across all languages.

Remember how English speakers used to call Beijing "Peking"? etc etc etc.

[at140]

6. The English obviously had trouble with pronunciation

How did they get Bombay out of Mumbai?

[fierywoman]

8. Everyone has trouble pronouncing other languages, I think!

In Venetian dialect, money is "schei" (pronounced "skay&quot from when money was called "schilling" when they were occupied by the Austrians.

[at140]

11. You know what confounds me the most?

with so many different languages out there, how in the heck did science, art & mathematics knowledge transfer from country to country.

[fierywoman]

19. At different times, and depending on the field, different languages were the dominant language.

For example, for centuries Italian was the language of music. English, I believe, is the language of computer people. German for a long time was the language of science.

[Codeine]

38. They didn't.

The Portuguese called the place “Bombaim”, meaning “good bay” in an older version of Portuguese. The English eventually Anglicized it to Bombay. The locals had a bunch of different names for the area but eventually Marathi, Konkani, Gujarati, and Kannada speakers seemed to settle on variations of the modern name as a tribute to a goddess while the Hindi speakers called it Bambai.

Eventually the government adopted the named Mumbai to reflect the Maratha culture of the region and to shrug off some of the lingering elements of British colonialism.

Proud graduate of the University of Googling Shit, at your service.

[lapucelle]

5. Deutschland

[Wounded Bear]

39. From which we derive the apellation "Pensylvania Dutch"...

which actually refers to Germans, some of whom were Hessians abandoned there by the British after the Revolutionary War. Many Germans emigrated to the Pennsylvania coal country after the 1840's. There was a period of serious labor unrest, resulting in the uprisings of 1848. There is a good book about that period by that title 1848.

The real "Dutch" folks were Nederlanders, from Holland, and lived in the Hudson River Valley, from when New York was New Amsterdam, a Dutch colony.

History is fun.

[lapucelle]

44. I didn't know that...it sounds like an answer to a Jeopardy question!

[Harker]

7. I try.

Rolling the "r" in Berlin got me severely ridiculed once, but I do try.

[Wounded Bear]

40. Yeah, but did you call yourself a donut?

Apologies to John F Kennedy, who was really trying.

[Harker]

42. I might next time.

I'm almost there.

[Harker]

43. Lucky he wasn't in Hamburg

or Wien.

[Karadeniz]

9. How about using the natives'name/pronunciation? Moscva...Paree...

[Buzz cook]

10. America is the only country

where people expect you to use a foreign accent. If a word is traditionally used for a place or object why should we change it for one that is probably only used by the natives of a place?

You won't see the same "respect" given to French names by British people, or German names by the French etc. Except when those people also speak the foreign language in question, and not even then.

Besides that is pronunciation. Should we learn the proper way to say the tens of thousands of loan words in English? Should we learn the proper pronunciation of English words?

[unblock]

16. true; the french call england "angleterre" and germany "allemagne"

the german word for france is "frankreich".

[delisen]

12. Roma! and pronounce Paris as the French do

Wien

There is definitely a double standard in media for Western European countries tries vs rest of world.

[PoindexterOglethorpe]

13. The Spanish call the current Queen of England Isabella.

Which seems rude, since we call their monarch of their country Felipe, not Phillip.

And if you've heard Köln pronounced (please notice the umlaut over the o) it's a vowel sound that's not really that easy for English speakers.

[LAS14]

14. So let us pronounce it without the umlaut (which I don't know how to type). Koln would be...

...better than Cologne.

[DFW]

22. Without the umlaut, you might as well stick with Cologne.

I live in Germany, and speak German with my wife at home. The "ö" has a completely different sound from the "o." And if Cologne becomes Köln, then does Munich become München, and will you pronounce Berlin as "behr-LEEN" and Stuttgart as "SHTOOT-gart?"

I say you might as well pronounce the names of places so as to make yourself best understood to the person you are talking to. Even within some countries, the pronunciation of their own cities differs. What we call "Geneva" is called "Genève" by the locals, Genf in Zürich, and Ginevra in Lugano. All those places are in Switzerland--which is "la Suisse," "die Schweiz," or "la Svizzera," depending on which major area of the country you're in. In Scuol, it's something else, since native speakers of Romansch still live there.

If you're on the Swedish-speaking part of the west coast of Finland, then you're indeed in Finland. Head east, though, and you're in Suomi (SOO-oh-mee). If you are visiting the lake country, good luck with Jyväskylä.

Asking Americans to get their mouths around the Danish pronunciation of København is usually requesting verbal acrobatics above and beyond the call. No surprise that most of us stick with "Copenhagen." Most of the rest of Europe uses a version of that, too.

Then there are the declined languages. The capital of Russia is Москва, or "MOSK-va," but only as the subject of a sentence. If you're going there, you're going to Москву, or "mahsk-VOO." If you're already there, you're в Москве, or "v mahsk-VYEH." In Russian, an unstressed "o" is pronounced like a short "a."

By the way, if you have windows, try the sequence of Start-Programs-Accessories-Character Map. In Character Map, you will find all the exotic punctuation you need to write most European or Semitic languages.

[LAS14]

23. I think that's a little ridiculous. nt

[DFW]

25. No more ridiculous than saying "Koln" instead of what it really is.

That's like claiming that saying "Chi-KAY-go" is the same as saying "Chi-KAH-go." In German, the ö is a completely different vowel from the o. If you're not going to use the correct name of the city, you might as well use the one most widely known where you are. No one in Europe does it any differently. Even the German train conductors announce the destination in Nederlands (Dutch) as "Keulen" when the train is still in the Netherlands.

[Sneederbunk]

15. Peiping, Peking, Beijing.

[unblock]

17. ok, let's all call bangkok by its real name:

https://www.maungawhau.school.nz/2014/11/10/bangkoks-real-name/

Bangkok is the capitol of Thailand but its real name is:

“Krung Thep Mahanakhon Amon Rattanakosin Mahinthara Ayuthaya Mahadilok Phop Noppharat Ratchathani Burirom Udomratchaniwet Mahasathan Amon Piman Awatan Sathit Sakkathattiya Witsanukam Prasit.”

What it means is “The city of angels, the great city, the residence of the Emerald Buddha, the impregnable city (unlike Ayutthaya) of God Indra, the grand capital of the world endowed with nine precious gems, the happy city, abounding in an enormous Royal Palace that resembles the heavenly abode where reigns the reincarnated god, a city given by Indra and built by Vishnukarn.”

But most Thai people just call it Krung Thep

[enid602]

30. and LA is. . .

El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora, la Reina De Los Ángeles De Porciuncula.

[ProudLib72]

18. It's spelled Y-A-C-H-T

But it's pronounced "mango throat warbler".

[unblock]

32. you're a very silly man and i'm not going to interview you!

(actually, it's pronounced "throatwobbler mangrove", though i think i like yours better )

[ProudLib72]

33. I couldn't find the clip on youtube

I tried hard...

[unblock]

34. i googled the script ;)

[Aristus]

24. The name 'Cologne' is derived from the Roman term 'Colonia Agrippina',

which was the name of the city at the height of the Roman Empire. 'Koln", with the umlaut I can't add on this keyboard, is just the German pronunciation.

[iscooterliberally]

27. I'm not sure what the locals would call this place, but here's a nice weatherman to help:

[CottonBear]

45. I am in awe of Mr. Dutton's Welsh pronunciation skill!

[hay rick]

28. I now call the United States Lower Slobbovia.

Me being nice.

[enid602]

29. Latin

Why do people throughout the Latin world say Londres, Nueva York, Varsovia and Moscú?

[Blue_Tires]

35. I do; what's your point?

[steve2470]

36. helpful pronunciation of K(cannot get lower case o umlaut to render)ln

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/18/Koeln.ogg

Köln

[Codeine]

37. Because literally every culture

does exactly the same thing. We don’t even have the sound you need to say Köln properly in English. We’d still be saying it “wrong”, but just in a different way. Our name for it seems to have originated when Latinized names of cities were still used a lot in scholarly writing, so Colonia became Cologne over time in French, and carried over into English.

Lisbon comes from the Portuguese nasalization of the second part of Lisboa — there’s really not a corresponding sound in English, but it actually comes pretty close to “bon”.

Do we mock the French for calling England “Angleterre”? Or for calling Köln Cologne, for that matter?

[Tommy_Carcetti]

41. Recently there's been an effort to stress Kyiv over Kiev

The former (pronounced key-you) being the Ukrainian form over the more Russified Kiev.

Presumably this applies for the chicken as well.