# Do Foreign Languages Have Their Own Names For American States **URL:** \ **Category:** Factual Questions\ **Created:** [April 12, 2010, 3:48pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-foreign-languages-have-their-own-names-for-american-states/535847 "2010-04-12T15:48:30Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 5
**Author:** ![JKellyMap](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/jkellymap/32/15880_2.png) [@JKellyMap](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/JKellyMap)\ **Post date:** [April 13, 2010, 9:09pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-foreign-languages-have-their-own-names-for-american-states/535847/81 "2010-04-13T21:09:25Z")
> [@bordelond](#): > > Maybe things are changing – I’m doing a lot of random searches of Russian Wikipedia (last few minutes: Hyderabad, William Randolph Hearst, Ho Chi Minh City, Lockheed Martin). Cyrillic “X” for English “h” appears to be gaining ground. > > Interestingly, “Lockheed Martin” was untransliterated – it was just left in Roman script. > > I did turn up “ **алкогол** ” (alcohol) and “ **гексан** ” (hexane), however. Anthony Burgess clearly linked the Russian “x” to the English “h”, or otherwise the whole “horrorshow” pun wouldn’t have happened in _A Clockwork Orange_. ---
**Author:** ![Shot\_From\_Guns](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/ccd318/32.png) [@Shot\_From\_Guns](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Shot_From_Guns)\ **Post date:** [April 13, 2010, 10:00pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-foreign-languages-have-their-own-names-for-american-states/535847/82 "2010-04-13T22:00:19Z")
> [@Bytegeist](#): > > They’ve chosen to approximate the V sound with a B (_Bājinia_ for Virginia, _Nebada_ for Nevada), and yet they have in their repertoire a perfectly good F — just sitting there, ready to deploy — which would be a closer match. The V is the voiced version of the consonant; F is the unvoiced. > > I’m not criticizing. (I’m glad they’ve gone with B here. It’s _funnier_.) But maybe that means the voiced/unvoiced quality of a foreign language’s sound is more important to match than its underlying “shape”, when approximating it? Could very well be. All I know is that “b” just tends to traditionally have been treated as the “v” stand-in for foreign words that contain it. Though these days, you also see it fudged by putting diacriticals on ウ _u_, so that \*va \*would be written as ヴァ, which is an ウ with diacriticals that indicate that a sound is voiced (e.g. カ \*ka \*versus ガ _ga_), plus a small ア \*a \*to indicate the vowel sound. Check out the section “Modern digraph additions with diacritics” on [this table of katakana](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katakana#Table_of_katakana) for more examples of current ways that non-native phonemes are being written. ---
**Author:** ![EdwardLost](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/bbe5ce/32.png) [@EdwardLost](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/EdwardLost)\ **Post date:** [April 13, 2010, 10:04pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-foreign-languages-have-their-own-names-for-american-states/535847/83 "2010-04-13T22:04:22Z")
It’s interesting that residents of other countries translate “Nova Scotia” into their own language, but the locals do not. Does any country translate Nevada into “Snowy”. ---
**Author:** ![hibernicus](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/hibernicus/32/2802_2.png) [@hibernicus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/hibernicus)\ **Post date:** [April 13, 2010, 10:05pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-foreign-languages-have-their-own-names-for-american-states/535847/84 "2010-04-13T22:05:18Z")
> [@Bytegeist](#): > > Thanks again for the info. > Now that brings up another oddity. Or so I think. > > They’ve chosen to approximate the V sound with a B (_Bājinia_ for Virginia, _Nebada_ for Nevada), and yet they have in their repertoire a perfectly good F — just sitting there, ready to deploy — which would be a closer match. The V is the voiced version of the consonant; F is the unvoiced. There isn’t a perfectly good “f” though, and certainly no “fa” in Japanese. The h- syllables are often transliterated as ha hi **fu** he ho, but even the “fu” sound is really not very “f”-like. It is somewhere between “hu” and “fu”. Having said that, there are ways to write certain foreign sounds such as “va” and “fe” in kana.　For example ヴァゼリン = Vaseline; フィエスタ = fiesta. ---
**Author:** ![Spectre\_of\_Pithecanthropus](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/spectre_of_pithecanthropus/32/12343_2.png) [@Spectre\_of\_Pithecanthropus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Spectre_of_Pithecanthropus)\ **Post date:** [April 13, 2010, 10:11pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-foreign-languages-have-their-own-names-for-american-states/535847/85 "2010-04-13T22:11:35Z")
> [@tschild](#): > > German uses the English names (in English pronounciation), _except_ for California = Kalifornien. Except for Austrians, though, who from what we’ve seen say “Kah-lee-forn-yuh”. :D. What many Americans don’t know is that there’s also a Kalifornien in Germany itself, you can look it up in the German Wikipedia. By all accounts, it appears to be little more than a housing development, though. IIRC the French have a word for it as well, “Californie”. Generally it seems that local subdivisions or provinces do tend to have their own names in foreign languages if the place is large or famous enough for some reason. I suspect it helps if the places existed independently before the modern country was formed. So in English we have names for just about all the historic German regions, e.g. Bavaria, Saxony, Rhineland-Palatinate, etc. And the same is more or less true of Italy as well. With California, America (as in United States) was just too big to be a useful point of reference. So when the Gold Rush happened in 1848, and people were coming in from all over the world, it didn’t make sense for a European to say they were “going to America”, not least because California had only been part of the U.S. for a couple of years by that time, and certainly wasn’t the “America” of the time, which for most people meant New York, Boston, New England, and so on. So almost by necessity California came to be a separately identifiable place. ---
**Author:** ![matt\_mcl](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/7ab992/32.png) [@matt\_mcl](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/matt_mcl)\ **Post date:** [April 14, 2010, 3:17am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-foreign-languages-have-their-own-names-for-american-states/535847/86 "2010-04-14T03:17:14Z")
By the way, in French, all the American states have a gender, and use a definite article, except for New York (since that’s named for a city, which doesn’t take an article), Hawaii (island, ditto), and Washington (person, ditto). They’re generally called _l’État de New York_ etc. Same for Canada. In the case of Canada, the gender is determined in certain cases by the gender of the origin of the name: _le Manitoba_ (named for _le lac Manitoba_) but _la Saskatchewan_ (named for _la rivière Saskatchewan_). Only _Terre-Neuve-et-Labrador_ is without an article, since _Terre-Neuve_ lacks one as an island. _Québec_ didn’t use to have one, since it was named for the city, but with the emergence of nationalism it acquired one, so that _le Québec_ is the province and _Québec_ is the city (although it’s still called in full _la province de Québec_, not _du Québec_). (I once got in trouble in a French class for assuming that since _Québec_ is a city and _le Québec_ is a province, New York state would be _le New York_. Silly **matt**!) ---
**Author:** ![matt\_mcl](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/7ab992/32.png) [@matt\_mcl](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/matt_mcl)\ **Post date:** [April 14, 2010, 3:18am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-foreign-languages-have-their-own-names-for-american-states/535847/87 "2010-04-14T03:18:56Z")
[Here](http://eo.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usona_%C5%9Dtato), by the way, are the states in Esperanto. [For Canada, too.](http://eo.wikipedia.org/wiki/Provincoj_kaj_Teritorioj_de_Kanado) ---
**Author:** ![Northern\_Piper](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/northern_piper/32/5304_2.png) [@Northern\_Piper](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Northern_Piper)\ **Post date:** [April 14, 2010, 4:25am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-foreign-languages-have-their-own-names-for-american-states/535847/88 "2010-04-14T04:25:35Z")
> [@EdwardLost](#): > > It’s interesting that residents of other countries translate “Nova Scotia” into their own language, but the locals do not. Some locals, namely the Acadiens of Nouvelle-Écosse, do in fact translate it. 😉 ---
**Author:** ![devilsknew](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/4da419/32.png) [@devilsknew](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/devilsknew)\ **Post date:** [April 14, 2010, 9:08am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-foreign-languages-have-their-own-names-for-american-states/535847/89 "2010-04-14T09:08:12Z")
In German, The Great Lakes are called _Eriesee_, _Huronsee_, _Michigansee_, _Oberer See_ (Lake Superior), and _Ontariosee_. I’m not sure exactly why the lake or river always comes after the proper name in German, some genitive thing maybe? Or how about hearing a German pronounce “New Orleans” as “Neu Orléans”. A German parsing it half way between German and the true French pronunciation of [Orléans](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orleans). ---
**Author:** ![Zahava424](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/z/76d3ee/32.png) [@Zahava424](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Zahava424)\ **Post date:** [April 14, 2010, 9:18am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-foreign-languages-have-their-own-names-for-american-states/535847/90 "2010-04-14T09:18:24Z")
> [@Neptunian\_Slug](#): > > Russian is a mixed bag. For states with “New” in them, Russian uses “Нью” which is just a literal transliteration of New. > > For states with directionals, they put the directional in Russian, “Северная Дакота” or “Severnaya Dakota”. > > There could be some cities in Alaska where Russian has a different name for the town given their prior ownership, but I don’t know of any. Also, I think it’s funny that for Mexico, Russians pronounce the “x” the way Americans do (thus, a Mexican person is мексиканский, or Mexikanski), while for Texas, they pronounce “x” the Spanish way (so Texas is техас, or Tekhas). This struck me as choosing the pronunciation least preferred by each place’s residents. Of course, it’s complicated by the fact that the letter that looks like “x” in Russian is pronounced “kh,” so there may simply be come transliteration confusion. ---
**Author:** ![Noone\_Special](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/noone_special/32/2863_2.png) [@Noone\_Special](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Noone_Special)\ **Post date:** [April 14, 2010, 9:25am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-foreign-languages-have-their-own-names-for-american-states/535847/91 "2010-04-14T09:25:58Z")
> [@Kyla](#): > > BTW, in other languages I’ve studied, the word for the US is just a translation of United States of America, but in Hebrew, it’s Artzot haBrit, or Lands of the Covenant. I always think that sounds pretty awesome. > [@Alessan](#): > > I’d translate it as “Lands of the Alliance”, but yeah. It’s pretty cool (and in abbreviated form: ARHB) Also, the old USSR ( **Union** of Soviet Socialist Republics) was called “_Brit Ha-Moatzot_” in Hebrew – same word “_brit_” for “Union” or “Alliance.” As to place names within the US – Hebrew is inconsistent. “New” anything stays “new” – “New York,” “New Mexico…” But North and South (and in the rare cases anyone here cares about it enough, West :p) are translated into their Hebrew equivalents – so you get, e.g., “Tzfon Karolayna” for NC. I’m failing to think of anything other than these 4 (OK, OK, 5!!) cases of “directional” state names where American place names aren’t simply transliterated. Even, for example, New England is “_New Ingland_,” although England itself is called Anglia in Hebrew. If you’re talking about the “North East,” however, it’s translated. ---
**Author:** ![Polycarp](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/82dd89/32.png) [@Polycarp](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Polycarp)\ **Post date:** [April 14, 2010, 9:41am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-foreign-languages-have-their-own-names-for-american-states/535847/92 "2010-04-14T09:41:49Z")
> [@Zahava424](#): > > Also, I think it’s funny that for Mexico, Russians pronounce the “x” the way Americans do (thus, a Mexican person is мексиканский, or Mexikanski), while for Texas, they pronounce “x” the Spanish way (so Texas is техас, or Tekhas). This struck me as choosing the pronunciation least preferred by each place’s residents. Of course, it’s complicated by the fact that the letter that looks like “x” in Russian is pronounced “kh,” so there may simply be come transliteration confusion. Chi (χ) in most Greek dialects was pronounced with the “kh” sound (usually rendered /k/ in English borrowings, as in psychology or hypochondria). But in some Ionian dialects which were nearest Italy, it represented a /ks/ sound. (Compare how /r/ is rendered in the speech of someone from Aberdeen, an upper class Englishman, a Bostonian, an Alabaman, someone from Omaha, and a four year old telling you she ‘was a very good girl’.) The Romans borrowed X via the Ionians, and gave it the /ks/ sound, which was preserved in most languages using the Latin alphabet. On thinking about the Spanish forms for the four “New” states, I have a WAG to offer: All four states were founded as colonies in the early 1600s, New Hampshire and New Jersey by the English, who named them. (New York came along a generation later, after the Dutch ceded New Amsterdam and it was renamed New York in honor of the King’s brother and heir presumptive.) But New Mexico was a Spanish _colonia_ for two centuries before the Mexican War, and was probably known as Nuevo Mexico during that period, in much the same way as the area south of Brownsville is Nuevo Leon today. This would explain the divergence between the three 'New’s and the Nuevo for the state names in Spanish. ---
**Author:** ![Nava](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/n/da6949/32.png) [@Nava](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Nava)\ **Post date:** [April 14, 2010, 11:40am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-foreign-languages-have-their-own-names-for-american-states/535847/93 "2010-04-14T11:40:05Z")
It’s not three “news”, it’s two “news” and two “nuevos”, at least in Spain. Nueva York 🙂 York was known both because that’s what we call cooked ham and for the House of York; Jersey is what we call pullovers; Hampshire… what’s that? New Mexico was indeed Nuevo Méjico before being New Mexico, but “it’s what it was originally called” doesn’t explain Nueva York, Nuevo Amsterdam or Nueva Orleans. Or Carolina del Sur vs West Virginia… Mind you, any explanation we can come up with is bound to have elements of retconning: sometimes you just have to get to a point where you say “it’s that way because somehow that’s the way it ended up being”. ---
**Author:** ![Ludovic](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/l/7ab992/32.png) [@Ludovic](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Ludovic)\ **Post date:** [April 14, 2010, 1:38pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-foreign-languages-have-their-own-names-for-american-states/535847/94 "2010-04-14T13:38:35Z")
> [@Nava](#): > > but “it’s what it was originally called” doesn’t explain Nueva York, Nuevo Amsterdam or Nueva Orleans. Someone liked it better that way. ---
**Author:** ![ElvisL1ves](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/5daacb/32.png) [@ElvisL1ves](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/ElvisL1ves)\ **Post date:** [April 14, 2010, 2:34pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-foreign-languages-have-their-own-names-for-american-states/535847/95 "2010-04-14T14:34:42Z")
Not quite on point, but I once saw a Russian map of the world that called the Ivory Coast “Bereg Slonovoi Kostyei” - Coast of Elephant Bones. Just thought I’d share. ---
**Author:** ![Sapo](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/ec9cab/32.png) [@Sapo](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Sapo)\ **Post date:** [April 14, 2010, 2:57pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-foreign-languages-have-their-own-names-for-american-states/535847/96 "2010-04-14T14:57:51Z")
As cited for French upthread, Spanish translates the directionals and the “New” while leaving everything else the same. Nueva York (as in the OP) Nuevo Mexico (or Mejico some time ago) Carolina del Norte (or “del Sur”) etc. Interestingly, New Hampshire is seldom traduced (and seldom mentioned, for that matter). New Jersey is a bit of a coin toss. Sometimes translated, sometimes not. My WAG is that York and Mexico are close enough when said in Spanish while Hampshire is so English that you either go all English with it or risk mangling the translation badly. ETA: Oops, didn’t see there was a second page. Beaten by Nava by well over a day. ---
**Author:** ![Alessan](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/alessan/32/465_2.png) [@Alessan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Alessan)\ **Post date:** [April 14, 2010, 3:53pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-foreign-languages-have-their-own-names-for-american-states/535847/97 "2010-04-14T15:53:10Z")
> [@Noone\_Special](#): > > As to place names within the US – Hebrew is inconsistent. “New” anything stays “new” – “New York,” “New Mexico…” But North and South (and in the rare cases anyone here cares about it enough, West :p) are translated into their Hebrew equivalents – so you get, e.g., “Tzfon Karolayna” for NC. I think that this may have something to do with the fact that while Israelis have little problem pronouncing “J”, “W” and “Ch” sounds, even though they don’t officially exist in Hebrew, they tend to stumble a bit with “Th”, especially at the end of words. Translating “North” and “South” is an easy way to get around this. ---
**Author:** ![ElvisL1ves](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/5daacb/32.png) [@ElvisL1ves](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/ElvisL1ves)\ **Post date:** [April 14, 2010, 3:59pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-foreign-languages-have-their-own-names-for-american-states/535847/98 "2010-04-14T15:59:14Z")
Good point. Non-anglophones might have trouble even recognizing the letters “th” as representing a single sound, not to mention that it doesn’t even exist in most languages anyway. ---
**Author:** ![Nava](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/n/da6949/32.png) [@Nava](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Nava)\ **Post date:** [April 14, 2010, 4:22pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-foreign-languages-have-their-own-names-for-american-states/535847/99 "2010-04-14T16:22:21Z")
> [@Sapo](#): > > New Jersey is a bit of a coin toss. Sometimes translated, sometimes not. I’ve heard it as both Nuevo “Yérsi” and Nueva “Yérsi”, too, but always with a pronunciation closer to English than to the Spanish pronunciation of jersei. Have you ever heard Virginia del Oeste or Virginia Occidental? I think I may have heard the second one a veeeeery few times, but it could be one of those things with regional variations. ---
**Author:** ![Timchik](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/c0e974/32.png) [@Timchik](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Timchik)\ **Post date:** [April 14, 2010, 5:04pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-foreign-languages-have-their-own-names-for-american-states/535847/100 "2010-04-14T17:04:24Z")
> [@Zahava424](#): > > Also, I think it’s funny that for Mexico, Russians pronounce the “x” the way Americans do (thus, a Mexican person is мексиканский, or Mexikanski), while for Texas, they pronounce “x” the Spanish way (so Texas is техас, or Tekhas). This struck me as choosing the pronunciation least preferred by each place’s residents. Of course, it’s complicated by the fact that the letter that looks like “x” in Russian is pronounced “kh,” so there may simply be come transliteration confusion. Even stranger is that the country of Mexico is called Мексико (Meksiko), following English pronunciation, more or less, but Mexico City is Мехико (Mekhiko), following Spanish. At least they don’t ever confuse the two. As for the г/х thing, my general impression is that the older something is (or at least the longer Russians have known about it) the more likely it is that H will be represented by Г. Any new transliterations invariably use Х. The shift seems to have occurred early-mid 20th century. So you get things like Говард Хьюз - the name “Howard” is old enough that it gets a Г, but Hughes gets a Х. (Using Г for H isn’t that large a stretch, actually - although it’s usually a hard G sound in standard Russian, southern dialects of Russian pronounce Г as a very open, breathy kind of H.) [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-foreign-languages-have-their-own-names-for-american-states/535847.md?page=4) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-foreign-languages-have-their-own-names-for-american-states/535847.md?page=6)