jtur88:
That is not necessarily applicable to proper names. My legal name is “just words”, and any form other than that on my legal documents of identity at my place of origin is wrong and cannot be justified. Allowances made only for languages that use a different alphabet, but they are restricted to the closest phonetic approximation in their alphabet.
For example, if my legal name is John, and I immigrate to a Spanish speaking country, my legal name does not become Juan.
Back to names of places. Modern countries are pretty much known by the same name everywhere , with allowances made in a few cases for non-existent phonemes, or endings that need to be changed to validate the name to be declined as a noun. or whose names contain a common word (south, new, republic, etc.). But countries that have been in existence for centuries have acquired names in various languages, according to the diplomatic customs of previous eras, which are now too well vested to change, and not many English speakers are eager to learn (and pronounce) names like Sverige or Misr, when they can’t even find the places on a map using their customary names.
I didn’t mean that proper names had to be different in different languages, only that they can be.
My father’s name in Hungarian is quite different from his name in English.
John_DiFool:
Why doesn’t everybody, for example, call Germany what the Germans call their own country, Deutschland? Doesn’t seem that hard for anybody else to learn-is there an etymological reason why?
20 replies without a link to Cecil’s comprehensive column: Why are there so many names for Germany, AKA Deutschland, Allemagne, etc.? The Straight Dope re-education dungeon will be full tonight…
Not quite true. The Cambodians still call it Kampuchea: Preăh Réachéanachâk Kâmpŭchéa or Kingdom of Kampuchea.
While it’s true that Siam has an association with the Sanskrit Syama (“dark” or “brown”), another story is that Siam or Sayam comes from an old word used in the Angkor empire for “slave,” similar to how Slav became “slave.” At any rate, they didn’t “throw off” the word so much as they wanted a name that would indicate a homeland for all the Thai or Tai peoples in Southeast Asia, of whom there are quite a few outside Thai borders.