The point is that different people have different ways of saying things. That is a fundamental reality of human language. People say things differently, so languages that people use say things differently.
When it comes to names for things, there is no “correct” or “original.”
And, frankly, to me this is a virtue of human language. It creates a flexibility and diversity that we can learn from and enjoy.
No, Spanish language broadcasts in the United States refer to it as “Nueva York.” My German textbook referred to it as “Neujork.”
Oh, yes, things would be much easier if everyone did everything exactly the same way. We should speak one language, even. On the other hand, we could learn to live with the fact that things aren’t always the same. It’s not that hard. In fact, humans have been dealing with it since the beginning.
Things would be easier if everyone just listened to me.
If your confused about those, try some Hungarian equivalents:
Pozsony = Bratislava
Olaszorszag = Italy
Becs = Vienna
Parkany = Sturovo (a town in Slovakia)
Kolozsvar = Cluj-Napoca (Romania)
(I’ve omitted the appropriate accents, but you get the point.)
Lake Balaton in Hungary is known as Plattensee to the Germans.
In Polish, Rome is Rzym, pronounced something like “Zhim.” Italy is “Wlochy” (with a slash through that “l”)
It’s all nuts. Some have simple explanations, like border towns having different names depending on which nationality you’re talking to, others are historical names, and others I have no clue whence they came.
I was going to say that New York was never called Neu Jork or Neu York in German, but after a quick check in some older books I found out that I was wrong. Still neither I nor my parents have ever heard it. So I don’t think it was was used very much after World War II. acsenray, when was your texbook printed?
Folks, let’s not forget that most all American place names have been on the international scene for a relatively short amount of time – less than 250 years. And nearly 100 of those 250 years have been subject to the language-change-retarding affects of global mass communication.
It makes perfect sense that, very generally, most places in America would be pretty much called what they are called in America (within reasonable linguistic bounds).
Now, if the USA were a 1200-year-old nation, its place names would have had over a millenium of time to shift in other languages. Not to mention what would have happened to American place names had portions of the US changed hands from this power to that power over the centuries.
Think about the way European history has gone down. Compare that to the course of US history. That’s a big part of the OP’s answer.
Uh, I don’t think so. Check out (no pun intended) some German versions of Czech place names:
Czech -> German
Plzen -> Pilsen
Praha -> Prag
Ceske Budejovice -> Budweis
Karlovy Vary -> Carlsbad
There are a zillion others. Some of these are probably just translations of the sound (Plzen -> Pilsen), others are translations of the meaning (Karlovy Vary means “Charles Bath”, named after the local hot springs used by Emperor Charles, which in German is Carls Bad).
Note that a large American company has really screwed things up by naming their beer “Budweiser”. First of all, the German “W” is pronounced like the English “V”. Second, Budweiser bears no resemblance to beer that is actually brewed in Budweis.
Hrvatska -> Croatia (which explains why the cars with ‘HR’ stickers on the bumper are not from Hungary, er, I mean Magyarorszag.)
I was in Zagreb when the Croatian football team played Scotia, not Scotland.
Going on a tangent, what about the names of border towns? I’m thinking of El Paso and Juarez, separated by only the Rio Grande (or is it the Rio Bravo?), having different names, but Nogales, Arizona and Nogales, Sonora having the same name. For cities separated by a border, is it more common to have the same name or different names?
Dag Otto, I would imaginge that Nogales was one city which found itself split in two by the imposition of the international border along the Rio (just a guess, I could be wrong).
As far as I know, El Paso and Juárez were always distinct from one another. Two separate towns that bumped up against one another as they grew. I’ll have to look up some local history in order to verify this, though. I know that some parts of town switched “jurisdiction” at some point when the course of the Rio changed.
The use of own-language versions for foreign place names seems to be on the decline, though. This translation of the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia which, judging from the style of the English text, seems to be contemporary or at least no later that 18th century, uses a lot of anglicised place/region/river names that are not in use today. Other examples: The English name Frankfort for Frankfurt, and the German name Neu-York for New York, are no longer used.
Oh, and there’s so many more. Even place names within the same country sometimes go by different names depending on what side of the railroad tracks you come from:
And, not wholly on topic, but I’ve always wanted to share this, the town of Mikhaylovgrad, Bulgaria, a rather large city by Bulgarian standards, changed its name to … Montana. Maybe there’s a prosaic explanation of why, but I found it kind of humorous in a surreal way. We were driving through Bulgaria to Macedonia and I read on my outdated map “Mikhaylovgard.” Instead, I’m greeted by a “Welcome to Montana” sign (in Bulgarian). You had to be there.
in an era when most people couldn’t read, they relied on their recollection of how somebody who had been there pronounced it (if he recalled it well enough) and then converted in into a form which sounded euphonious in their language. Until spelling crystallised in the 18th c. most people spelled words pretty much how they wanted to, and even different ways as the humor took them.
Nice to see someone from my neck of the…tumbleweeds.
“El Paso del Norte” was founded in the 1600’s around what is now the cathedral in central Juarez. In the early 1800’s a few people from south of the river began to homestead in what is now downtown El Paso. When the international border was set along the Rio Grande in 1848, this northern outpost became the nucleus of El Paso, TX. Juarez was renamed in 1888. The Chamizal area was switched over from around 1963 to 1967.
I think the reverse happened in Laredo/Nuevo Laredo, where the main part of the old town ended up on the Texas side, and the southern bank grew into “Nuevo Laredo”.
Most English names of European cities seem to be adapted via the French. Perhaps this is due to the Norman’s language being seen as more of a “cultured” language, therefore it was used to name foreign cities. After all, who would have travelled abroad more in the Middle Ages, regular peasants and yeomen, or nobles and clergy?
As far as cross-border towns with the same name, this is unheard of in Europe and is fairly rare in North America. For international ones, besides Nogales, there’s Sault Ste. Marie ON/MI and Niagara Falls NY/ON and that’s about it.
There’s more at the state/provincial level, but even those aren’t all that common. In the US, there’s Kansas City KS/MO, Texarkana TX/AR, Bristol TN/VA, Bluefield VA/WV, Union City IN/OH, and Delmar DE/MD plus a handful of smaller ones.
In Canada, Lloydminster AB/SK has a unique arrangement in that it is a single city with a single government and the whole thing is considered part of both provinces. The two provincial parliaments passed nearly identical laws on the same day to set this up. As far as I know, this arrangement is not duplicated anywhere else.
Nua Eabhrac, Nueva York, Nowy Jork,…
I have to admit, I was not aware of this.
And thinking about it, while it’s not Neu York in german it’s Neuseeland instead of New Zealand.
So obviously it’s not a particulary english thing.
That makes perfect sense if one has any knowledge of history at all. Włochy obviously is descended from the Germanic walh and walch, both of which could mean “foreigner” in general or “Roman” in the particular. Hence “Wallachia” as the name for the Romance-speaking part of the Balkans (it wasn’t “Romania” until the 19th century–first documented appearance in English in 1860 according to the OED).
