I live in a rural area that is 99% white and 1% Canadian.
I hear people talk about “Moslems” all the time.
Just checked on the net to see if other languages have more balls than we do. Many have.
French - Pékin
German - Peking
Czech - Peking
Croatian - Peking
Russian - Пекин
Portuguese - Pequim
Italian - Pachino
There are a whole lot more. Only a handful go the Beijing route.
And where did you check that those are the versions currently being used officially?
Often it’s a matter of the people whose country, capital, language… it is facing a choice between hearing it right or seeing it spelled in a way they consider proper. Does your own name get mangled often? Mine does, and while by cultural reasons I prefer people to pronounce it correctly than spell it properly (and will, in fact, spell it differently in different locations, shifting to whichever spelling appears to cause less trouble to the locals), I’ll abide by other people’s own choices about their own names.
Nitpick: English often uses the French names for foreign (but non-French) places. Florence is one example, but you can add Rome, Naples and lots of other places.
As for English-speakers “acceding to pressure” to change the names they use, what’s mostly happening is that English speakers substitute new transliterations which more accurately reflect the name. “Peking” was so called because the English - true to form - adopted a variant of the name given by the French to that city, but pronounced the French word as it if were a native English word. Unsurprisingly, “Peking” sounds nothing like the name it is supposed to be a transliteration of, and Chinese speakers struggling either to speak English or to underastand it were simply baffled by it.
Of course the English can refer to Peking by any name they like. But if they wish to be understood in some of the contexts where they are likely to be talking about Peking, there is merit in referring to it by a name that sounds at least vaguely like the name used by the inhabitants.
When I lived in Germany, my job involved a lot of travel. The first few times at the airport made me realize I needed to learn what all those cities were called over there, as I had a hell of a time figuring out which gate was mine. Munchen? Praha? Moskva? Help!
English’s status as the unofficial international language probably has something to do with this though, not just wrt Beijing but in general.
And then the greater sensitivity of nearby countries can have an influence also. For example China and Korea have an interesting dynamic given the relationship of their languages. Most words in Korean are derived one way or another from Chinese, though the basic framework of the languages is unrelated. Chinese derived words can be written in Chinese characters but have Korean pronunciations different from Mandarin. The characters for Beijing for example are pronounced Bukgyeong, those of the Chinese leader’s name (Xi Jinping) Seup Geun-pyeong and so forth. But it’s become media etiquette in recent times, and Chinese prefer, that the words be instead written phonetically in the Korean alphabet as closely as possible to how they are pronounced in Mandarin. Going the other way, Koreans used to be annoyed that Chinese media used the previous Chinese derived name for Seoul, Hanseong (Han [river] fort), because ‘Seoul’ is a quasi-indigenous Korean word with no Chinese character equivalent in meaning. Some years ago Chinese media changed its style protocol to use two characters with Mandarin pronunciation sounding like ‘Seoul’, but not related in meaning.
OTOH neither country has as much reason to care how Germans write place names in their countries. Besides being far away, Germans usually speak English to communicate with Chinese or Koreans.
I thought the claim that most Korean words were derived from Chinese sounded wrong, so I looked it up. It’s true though. About 60% of Korean words are derived from Chinese. Most common Korean words don’t come from Chinese though. It’s like English. About 60% of English words come from French, Latin, or Greek. Most common English words don’t come from those languages though. The Chinese influence on Korea is like the influence of the Norman Conquest (and the influx of words constructed from Latin or Greek roots) in English:
Actually, the English version is more similar to the original Latin (“Florentia”) than the modern-day Italian(“Firenze”), and is likely borrowed from the French (“Florence”) or the Spanish (“Florencia”).
Similarly, we call Germany “Germany” because it’s derived from the Latin “Germania”, while in French and Spanish, the term is derived from the name of the Alemanni, a barbarian tribe. Interestingly enough, in Italian, it’s still “Germania”.
The Germans themselves call their own country “Deutschland” from a earlier Germanic word meaning “of the people” or something similar, used in ancient times to describe themselves vs. Slavs or other non-Germanic speakers. Interestingly enough, the Italian term for a German (“Tedesco”) also derives from that same root word.
I really doubt most English foreign place names are all that ignorant- we either have mispronounced transliterations, or we have names that are derived from other languages, neither of which is particularly disrespectful.
Same goes for Muslim/Moslem, or even Mohammedan/Mahometan. None of those was really intended to be derogatory; Mohammedan is pretty much the same language construction as “Christian”- meaning a follower of Mohammed.
Bombay was not a mispronunciation. It was the actual name of the city (or at that time, a group of fortifications of no great importance), derived from its Portuguese name. The name was changed to Mumbai in English in 1995, for reasons that have very little to do with history and a great deal to do with Hindu and Marathi nationalism.
Those transliterations don’t actually reflect the pronunciation. It’s not just an “ny/ñ”, but that sound followed by a hard g. Here’s a video with the name being pronounced (0:15).
Because of the limited number of phonemes in many Pacific languages, many letters in the Latin alphabet were either dropped or made to do double duty. For example, in Fijian, m = mb, d = nd, g = ŋ, q = ŋg, so that Beqa, for example, is pronounced Mbeŋga.
Though Farsi is not related to Arabic, your comment made me wonder something about Arabic dialects.
I am aware that Arabic is spoken as a native language over a wide area – at least from Iraq westward through the Middle East and North Africa to the Atlantic shore of Morocco. And that the man-in-the-street pronunciations of Arabic vocabulary will differ place to place.
Classical Arabic (the language of the Qur’an), IIRC, has three vowel “values” – conceptually close to Spanish a, i, and u. Those vowels could be lengthened (very roughly, cf. the vowel sounds in English sit vs seal) and combined into diphthongs, so there were essentially more than just that three-way system in Classical Arabic. Point being, though, that if you start with a/i/u, it’s easy to see why Muslim is noted as the favored Arabic transliteration & pronunciation.
Now then: are there parts of the Arabic-speaking world where the vowels in the local dialect have shifted enough so that what comes out of the locals’ mouths when pronouncing Muslim would strike a Western listener as anything at all approaching “Moslem”?
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Right - but unfortunately in this last case the comparison inherent in that last construction can causes a bit of cognitive dissonance in Muslims. In Christianity worshiping Christ is de rigueur, whereas in Islam worshiping Muhammad is blasphemous. It’s one of the reasons the term has fallen out of use and is considered archaic.
What country are you from? A lot of South American football teams have anglicized names.
Because Canadians are non-whites?:dubious:
Hyperbole, maybe you’ve heard of it?
South American ones only? Where do you think Sporting de Gijón or Athletic de Bilbao got theirs? Those two aren’t even anglicized, they’re a mixture of English and Spanish.
Sounds to me like pango pango, but maybe I can’t hear the ñ because the combination of ñ-followed-by-g doesn’t exist in Spanish.
Can’t watch the video with sound right now, but the IPA pronunciation symbols given in Pago Pago’s Wikipedia article for the Samoan pronunciation is /ˈpaŋo ˈpaŋo/. Those /ŋ/ symbols represent the consonant in the middle of singer and are not the equivalent of the Spanish pronunciation of ñ.
The English pronunciation of Pago pago, /ˈpɑːŋɡoʊˈpɑːŋɡoʊ/, is also given. That /ŋɡ/ is where the perception of the “hard g” comes from – /ŋɡ/ is the middle consonantal sequence in bongo and finger.
At least we say Livorno, and not Leghorn, no matter what the breed of chickens might be called.
I agree it doesn’t have an ny sound, and I shouldn’t have mentioned that. My main point was that it would not be spelled Paño Paño in Spanish. I don’t think the appropriate phoneme exists in Spanish, so Pango Pango can’t really be spelled accurately in that language.
That’s a bit of a folk tale. Of course the typeset was designed for a specific language, but the Chinese names were first transliterated in Southern China*, where Mandarin was not the standard dialect/language. The spelling was change later to more closely correspond to the Mandarin pronunciation.
*It was originally “Peking, y’all” but the “y’all” was dropped later. 