Why are we Americans so inconsistent in our usage of foreign place names? Sometimes we leave the name in its native language (San Juan, Beijing, Botswana), while we Anglicize other names (Norway, Japan, Moscow)? We have even changed some over the years (Peking to Beijing). And some people go out of their way to pronounce “Barcelona” properly but not “Paris” or “Rome.” Is there any rhyme or reason to this, or is it just random tradition?
My guess is that it’s just random… I live in Korea (am a whitey, tho), and the Korean language does the same thing. America, in Korean, is “Mi-Gook” while Canada is “Ken-na-da.” Australia is “Ho-Chu” while France is (as close as it can be pronounced in Korean) “Pu-ran-suh”
Probably other languages do the same thing…
Yes. In Dutch, many words for cities and countries are Dutch, whereas others retain their native spelling.
We say Londen, Parijs, Berlijn, Rome, Praag, etc. Countries are often translated too: especially when they have more than one word in their name. “Frans Guyana”, for example. Why leave it English or French, if it’s practically a sentence?
For cities, I’d say that it is pretty much related with common use. Bejing used to be Peking here, but not after 1989. Iraq has become more common since the Gulf War.
Also covered last week in a hijack in the Tierra del Fuego thread, and tangentially in the column Why are there so many names for Germany?
A lot of this is “tradition” – meaning that we perpetuate the errors of long ago because no one’s got the effort to change them.
It’s always bothered me that we say “Florence” for a town that the locals call “Firenze”, or “Smyrna” for “Izmir”. But “Florence” and “Smyrna” have a long history in the English language, and aren’t likely to change. If you notice, newer foreign cities (Brasilia) tend to remain in their original form.
English isn’t the only language that does this – in French, “London” is “Londres”.
As for pronunciation, I think a lot of this is carryover from the British tradition of pronouncing things the way they would be if they were English words – hence Paris is “par-iss” instead of “pa-ree”. The British do the same thing with other foriegn words, as well. American English is a different animal – we tend to try and copy the original pronunciation. I was puzzled by this, until I stumbled across a phrase in a British novel that summed it up – “He did not condecend to pronounce it in the French fashion.” An American would never view attempting the native pronunciation as condecension. I suspect it’s because the local pronunciations of places now within the US were originally in those languages. So we try to pronounce “Baton Rouge” as “bah-ton roozh” and “La Jolla” as “la ho-ya”. If these had been conquered by the British instead of incorporated into the US I suspect they’d be pronounced “Bay-ton Rouj” and “La Jolla”.
Cal has a good answer, but I think he’s kind of harsh in defining “tradition” as the perpetuation of errors. Is it really an error to call it Finland
instead of Suomi? Is it laziness that we don’t go around changing Germany to Deutschland, India to Bharat, Croatia to Hrvatska, etc.? Not to mention Albania’s native name, Shqperi. How do you pronounce that?
But maybe I’m a reactionary – I still say Byelorussia instead of Belarus.
But what about Valdez, Alaska, Des Moines, Iowa and Nez Perce, Idaho?
TomH:
So, things aren’t consistent. I still like A. Whitney Brown’s line that the one thing we learned from the Exxon Valdez catastrophe is that Alaskans can’t correctly pronounce Spanish.
You must be from another part of the US than I, Cal.
Here in Indiana, we have the town of Brazil which the locals call ‘Brazzle,’ ‘Versailles’ which is pronounced ‘Ver-sayles,’ ‘Peru’ which is pronounced ‘Pee-Roo’, ‘Russiaville’ which is pronounced ‘Rooshaville’ and (my favourite) ‘Gnawbone’ wich is pronounced ‘Gannaw-Bone-ee’ and is a corroption of a French place name (something bon)
On the other hand, my Dad told me once that there is a popular bar in London called the ‘Elephant and Castle’ but it’s real name is ‘The Emphanter of Castille’
Cal: LOL. IIRC the townspeople voted on the pronunciation some time in the 1980s and decided to stay with Val-DEEz.
Arken: “Gnawbone” sounds like it might be a corruption of Narbonne which is in Languedoc-Rousillon, in the South of France.
Elephant and Castle is an area of South London, probably named after a local pub. It is likely that the pub was actually named after the Infanta de Castille, the title of one of the daughters of the King of Spain (a bit like calling it The Prince of Wales, I guess). This process, where a foreign word gets converted to a similar-sounding English counterpart, is delightfully known as “Hobson-Jobsonism”. British soldiers in India, observing Muslims chanting “Oh Hasan, Oh Husein” (Mohammed’s grandsons) took them to be chanting “Hobson Jobson”. The mind boggles.
Ya missed a letter there. IIRC, the ‘q’ in Albanian is somewhat like ‘k’ with a ‘y’ after it, and the ‘ë’ is pretty close to a schwa. So it would be thus:
Shkyi-puh-ri
Unfortunately I don’t know where the stress would fall.
I think part of the way we named things in English stems from what they were called in Latin. Albania, for instance. Moscow, I would guess, is much the same - I’ve seen ancient maps of the city with the Latin title Civitas Moscoviensis or something similar. Since the -skv- combination of letters is not one that occurs in Latin, they had to rearrange it a little to make it more pronounceable for the Western European reader.
That of course only applies to place names in Europe, western Asia, and Africa - my guess for the far East would be ‘best guess’ pronunciations trying to imitate the way the locals pronounced it.
Certainly not. It is the name of the country in the other national language, Swedish.
Thanks for the info, Tom.
You’re right about Narbonne definitely and I’m sure Infanta is also correct. I always wondered what an Emphanter was, but I thought it better not to ask.
My Dad liked to lecture.
Whaddya mean, “we Americans”? Youse don’t have a monopoly on the English language, and English doesn’t have a monopoly on this “inconsistency” phenomenon, you know.
So why don’t the British pronounce their own place names like English words? W-o-r-c-e-s-t-e-r is “wooster?” T-h-a-m-e-s is “timz?” How the heck is “Wroxeter” even go?
Peking - yes. It’s correct - in Wade-Giles Romanization. The symbol “k” is used for the sound of “j,” though God help me, I dunno why. With the complete list of symbols in use, P-e-k-i-n-g in Wade-Giles is pronounced the same as B-e-i-j-i-n-g is in Pinyin. Some names shift, some don’t. “Fujian” appears to have replaced “Fukkien,” but “Jiang Jieshe” will forever be “Chiang Kai-shek” in English-speaking lands.
Good point, labradorian. I didn’t invent the names or pronunciations for any of those places, & I’m not taking the blame for any of it.
Can’t we make them change the names to the way we pronounce them? After all, who has the nukes? I say from now on Paree is officially ParIS. All in favor…
Do you really still hear Izmir referred to as Smyrna? This is surprising to me (I’m not at all implying that it doesn’t happen to you) because I was born there and I’ve never heard it as Smyrna except in the context of “Izmir (formerly Smyrna).”
Does this happen a lot? I am most curious.
As for the OP: I wish we said the name the way that the country of ownership said it, even if it’s with an American (or whatever) accent. It’s not too difficult to say Roma, Firenze, Nippon, Suomi, etc.
Montpelier
or Mont pee lee eh in American. What do you think foreigners think of town names like Intercourse, or Normal, Illonois ir even Liberal Kansas?
Did you know that in France the Toyota MR2 sportscar is called something else? In France speak MR2 = MRdeux = merde = shit
In the case of Rome, the English spelling came from French. I believe there are several other non-French European names where there was a French influence. Lisbon and Seville, I think, and maybe others.