to call other countries or cities exactly what that country’s public relations people want you to call them? For instance, Peking became Beijing in the U.S., but I noticed that it’s still Peking in Germany. At some point Ukraine and Congo lost their articles, and their names still grate with me. They just sound wrong without the “the”, and I suspect that learning when to use articles is one of the harder things about learning English, when the person’s native language doesn’t have them.
I can understand the principle of being nice. Somebody asks you to do something, and you do it if it is a reasonable request. They want us to say Congo instead of The Congo, we’ll say Congo. But isn’t there a case to be made for standing up for the traditional name? It isn’t just a matter being nice to the Congolese and the Ukrainians. It’s also a matter of how English works. Most cities and countries don’t have articles. But a few exonyms do, in English. “Hague” sounds wrong, just as “The Los Angeles” would. It’s just how it is. We don’t have to let outsiders tell us how to speak English.
How is it in other countries? Are you so desperate to please as we are? Or do they still say The Congo in other Anglophone countries? Do Germans go on using names like Breslau, Danzig, and Königsberg, instead of scrupulously saying Wroclau, Gdansk, and Kaliningrad as we go?
Seriously, though, I don’t see any problem with different languages having different words for one and the same thing – I mean, that’s kinda why they’re different languages. I don’t call Deutschland Deutschland in English, I call it Germany, because that’s the English word for it; and in French, I call it Allemagne.
You’ve got the Republic of (the) Congo and the Democratic Republic of (the) Congo. If I ever talk about them, which isn’t often, nobody knows which one I’m referring to. (Sometimes I don’t know myself). The recommended alternatives of Congo-Brazzaville and Congo-Kinshasa don’t work either, so I’ve started calling them ‘the small Congo on the left hand side’ and ‘the big one next to it’.
It’s Parijs, Londen, Berlijn, Keulen, Neurenberg, Rome, Praag, Wenen and Moskou. Nothing outrageous, and nothing that foreigners wouldn’t recognize. I’m not really sure there’s a development in Dutch - I can’t think of any example of a toponym that changed usage during the post-war years. There’s a pretty long list of exonyms on wikipedia, and some of them (the English ones, for instance) have been out of use for a million years, but there’s none there that are no longer used but that I have seen in modern texts or heard anywhere in my lifetime. One thing that has changed is that we no longer speak of Nieuw Amsterdam but of New York instead, but that’s really the only thing.
You have to bear in mind why the “The” was there in the first place. For Ukraine, it was part of Soviet propaganda and imperialism. The USSR denied that Ukraine was another country, and even that Ukrainian was a separate language from Russian. All just one happy group of Rus under the beneficient Soviet. At most, the Ukraine was a region in the USSR, just like “the Midwest” is a region in the US.
So if you insist on using “The Ukraine”, you’re buying into Soviet propaganda. That’s why one of the first things the Ukrainians did on achieving independence was to insist that their country was “Ukraine”, just like “France” or “Germany.” It’s more than just being nice - it’s a question of national sovereignty.
Similar explanations for “The Congo,” I believe - it was a colonial reference to a region of Africa under European control, not to sovereign nations.
Would you be okay if other English-speakers refused to use the term “United States” and instead used the term “The American Colonies” in all communications?
St. Petersburg’s a funny one, because it originally was named in German, not Russian: Sankt-Peterburg. Only briefly was it Russified to Petrograd - before becoming Leningrad.
Now what about Kiev and Lvov vs. Kyiv and Lviv? The 1/4 of me that’s Ukrainian wants to know…
You’re missing the point here. The question is not whether you think it’s OK for us to have our own names or pronunciations of foreign places, but: if we’ve been using a particular variant of the same name, such as The Congo or The Ukraine for generations, should we be obliged, at a moment’s notice, to drop the article, because the people in the country want it that way? Note, I’m not talking about a situation where a name gets changed completely, as from Rhodesia to Zimbabwe. In that case to have continued using the name Rhodesia would have been reactionary and colonialist.
wiki: In particular, these amendments allowed the Ukrainian SSR to become one of founding members of the United Nations (UN) together with the Soviet Union and the Byelorussian SSR. This was part of a deal with the United States to ensure a degree of balance in the General Assembly, which, the USSR opined, was unbalanced in favor of the Western Bloc. In its capacity as a member of the UN, the Ukrainian SSR was an elected member of the United Nations Security Council 1948-1949 and 1984-1985.
As an old (amateur) sailor, I try to rise and fall with the tide. The city is now Beijing, but the duck is Peking and the dog is still Pekingese. The city is now (partly) Mumbai, but the gin and the Bicycle Club are still Bombay.
The country is now Thailand, the people are Thais, but the cat and the twins are Siamese. I’m still trying to figure out which parts of eastern Europe are what. Who are the Uzbeks, and who are the Turkmens (not the Turks)? Slovenian, Slavs, Czechs? I’ll figure it out someday, but by then they’ll probably have another revolt, and everyone will have another new name. Pikachustan, maybe. Oy.
That’s right, because they randomly invent ethnic identities over there in… Slavistan, or whatever funny name they’re calling it this week. That “Turkmen” thing is just deliberately confusing.
