I’m comfortable with the idea of pronunciations we can handle. Unidos Estados or whatever Spanish speakers call us is fine. I just wonder why you’d use a name that isn’t even a translation. Like Germany, or Finland. Those names just seem archaic.
Not sure this is a good argument. Isn’t there a difference between names and other kinds of words? How would you feel about being referred to as Karel or Carlito?
That makes me think of those people who insist on saying Eebeetha or Barthelona. Yes, it’s a rough approximation of how Spanish people say that in Spanish, but it’s not even the primary language in those places.
I think that it may have been mentioned upthread, but “Finland” is the official name of the country in one of the official languages that Finland has. What’s archaic about it?
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I thought they called their country Suomi.
In Finnish. A signifant5 minority speaks Swedish.
^^^
Finland has (at least) two (I don’t know about Sami) official languages: Finnish and Swedish. In Finnish, the name is Suomi, in Swedish (and, incidentally, also in the other Scandinavian languages), the name is Finland.
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OK, let’s follow this to its logical conclusion. There are 22 species of endemic birds in Hispanola, which means they do not naturally occur anywhere in the world except Haiti and/or the Dominican Republic. Why should these bird species have English name like Black-crowned tanager, Hispaniolan parakeet and Least poorwill, since there is nobody there to call them that? Never mind that they happen to be members of families known as tanagers, parakeets and poorwills. And if you do wish to rename them by their local name do you name then in French, of Spanish?
Well, I don’t know about the “common names” of birds, but with plants, that is a reason most people who care about accurate communication use the latin names, rather than local variants. Who knows if a Russian’s buttercup or bluebell is the same as mine?
With birds, I could imagine that naming conventions have a significant Anglo influence. Birdwatching certainly does. Given their mobillty, it might make sense to name all members of a specific group - such as tanagers - consistently.
Of course not—you call them by what the birds call themselves.
Why would naming conventions for birds have an Anglo influence? Do you for some reason think that people in other countries hadn’t named their birds until you guys pointed out to us that aviones, urracas, garzas and patos are all different?
The groupings are also different by language, by the way.
Exonyms can be even more vexing when it comes to cities. When I defended my MA thesis, the Slavic-trained professors on my committee referred to Poland’s fourth-largest city as Wroclaw, which is the name I used in my thesis. The German-trained professors used Breslau. For a conference paper I did last year, I referred to the capital of Slovenia as Ljubljana; a German participant continually called it Laibach. Belgrade is the usual English term Serbia’s capital in English, but it’s Beograd to me.
…in a tweet, of course.