My understanding is that Nippon has become the formal name because foreigners find it easier to pronounce, but native speakers seem to slightly prefer Nihon in everyday speech. I learned it as Nihon when I learned the language.
But they’re as interchangeable as, say, America and “US” are in the USA. Either is correct and people might use both terms in the same conversation.
The Republic of the Congo-Leopoldville (1960) went from the Democratic Republic of the Congo (1964) to Zaire (1971) and back to the Democratic Republic of the Congo (1997).
Anyone who still calls it Rhodesia today has a very high probability of being a racist expat.
The first one is the English re-spelling of a Portuguese transliteration, the second one is a different transliteration which works better for Anglos but really badly for speakers of Romance languages. The actual pronunciation both attempt to reflect has not changed.
As I understand it a lot of foreign place names have this problem. The name shift for example from Peking to Beijing was to correct an English mispronunciation of a French or Spanish mispronunciation.
This one is interesting because the neighboring Slovakia is officially The Slovak Republic, too, but they’ve always been known as Slovakia. I wonder why Czechia is just now getting into the short name game.
It’s because Nazi Germany used “Czechia” to refer to one of the rump portions after Germany dismembered Czechoslovakia.
Vaclav Havel was strongly opposed to using a term from the Nazi/Fascist period.
When we were there in 2002, they were tolerant if we said the Ukraine, but they did correct us.
There is no word for “the” in Russian, is there one in Ukrainian?
“The Placename” was traditionally a province of a much larger empire, usually ruled by an ethnic group other than the Placenamians.
Also, “the Placename” was often a larger region, containing other ethnic groups.
Hence “the Ukraine” or “the Sudan” when they were colonies, but “Ukraine” or “Sudan” after independence.
There are no articles, which makes me wonder how often the issue came up.
Like The Bronx.
In Russian, never. But a lot of diplomacy is done through Anglophone of Francophone intermediaries.
Iran / Persia isn’t something that they mind: it’s something that you care about. The question is why you think it’s important. Iranians in places like America have gotten used to being called Iranians, but it wasn’t because they objected to the country being called Persia: quite the reverse, they were generally proud of their place in history.
China doesn’t mind being called China, but they have changed everything else. This is mostly because they want everyone /in China/ to use the names used in Peking, partly because they want everyone to use /the spelling/ that they are using in Peking, and partly because the traditional English pronunciation and spelling is based on the pronunciation and spelling used by the English in the English treaty ports: in Shanghai, the pronunciation was something like “Peking”, in Peking, the pronunciation is something like “Pajing”, but English spelling is weird and not used in most of the world, the normal spelling is Beijing. So the objection isn’t just to the Shanghai spelling and pronunciation, it’s a deliberate snub to an Anglo-centric view of China.
Siam (as in “The King and I” or “Anna and the King of Siam” was a mythical place. It was never colonized, and the term “Siam” had no real currency. The Thai’s are a majority ethnic group, and the term “Thailand” was offensive to non-Thai citizens when it was introduced, which gives you some idea why it was adopted.
Don’t forget the Republic of China and the People’s Republic of China as well as the Republic of Korea and the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.
All four of those countries get a little touchy when you mix them up.
Transliteration doesn’t necessarily involve mispronunciation: the Spanish word chao and its Italian mother ciao are pronounced the same, what would have been a mess would have been trying to respect spelling and pronunciation both, as the two spellings correspond to different spelling rules, different phoneme-to-letters mappings.
There’s places in Spain which used to have a name in Spanish and another in Catalan: different pronunciations and different spellings. Catalanist push for “Catalan only” has managed to make the Spanish names practically disappear, but now you get Spanish transliterations of the Catalan name. Cerdanyola (CAT) used to also be called Cerdañola (ES); now you get people spelling “Sardañola” when writing in Spanish. The new transliteration matches the Catalan pronunciation.
One time a coworker in Valencia was ranting against Spanish spellings of local names; he considered it a cultural insult to write Benifayó (ES) instead of Benifaió (VAL) or Almusafes (ES) instead of Almussafes (VAL). Both words are pronounced the same in either language, it’s only the spelling that happens to follow each language’s spelling rules. I pointed out that it’s not a case of “someone in Madrid deciding to change the spellings”, but of parallel evolution. He grudgingly admitted this might be true but said “well, I think place names should always be kept in the original language”. I asked how good his Arabic was. Stunned silence, general laughter and facepalms, end of discussion.
On a releated note: In “Laurance of Arabia’s” intorduction to “The 7 Pillars of Wisdom”, he notes that he’s adopted various random and inconsistant spellings of Arabic locations. Because, more or less, any English spelling would be wrong, and would just give the false impression that there was a correct English spelling.
Congo was changed to Zaire to get rid of colonial names but Congo had a long historical past, while Zaire was basically made up, which is why it was corrected.
Persia is much more complicated than the Wikipedia quote would give you. Some consider Persians as a subset of an Iranian group.
The Madras/Chennai is also disputable as Madras had a history further back than colonialism. In fact it can be show to go back as far at 1360.
So a lot of these changes are simply to make a statement, whatever that statement is.
I wouldn’t say Zaire was “made up.” It had a long historical use but was a Portuguese corruption of the Kongo word nzere/nzadi. Congo was more authentically African but was rejected by Mbutu because it had been the colonial name. Zaire in turn was rejected because it had been imposed by Mbutu. At least it served to distinguish it more easily from the neighboring Republic of the Congo.
Among my prized possessions are two one-million zaire bills featuring Mobutu that I got on a visit in 1993. At the time one such note would buy you a small beer. (Colibri’s Law of Beer Economics: when you need to be a millionaire to buy a beer, your country is in trouble.)
Just like Liberia and the US
They use pounds and feet
Fahrenheit and gallons
The English system can’t be beat
Myanmar Shave