Like matt_mcl points out, “Fiorentina” is simply the adjectival form of “Firenze,” which was originally “Florentia” in Latin.
Fiorentina is the name of Florence’s football/soccer team, the full name of which is the Assocazione Calcio* Fiorentina (usually abbreviated as “AC Fiorentina” or simply “Fiorentina”)–which means the “Florentine Football Association,” hence the use of the adjectival form.
*“Calcio” being the distinctly Italian term for soccer/football.
Thanks, I get that aspiration backwards a lot.
I don’t have time, but do a google search and I’m pretty sure you’ll see Taiwan does indeed now use pinyin. I didn’t believe it at first when someone on these boards pointed it out, but that’s what google found for me about a year ago.
OK, so you’ve brought up a fourth different pronunciation of j…dammit…
Anyway, I still maintain that ‘Beijing’ with a quais-CH J feels strange to a monolingual English speaker.
Immediately after WWII, the pronunciation of Hiroshima had the accent on the third syllable. However, for many years now the accent has been on the second syllable. Somebody once told me that the confusion is that Japanese don’t really accent syllables in their words. Is this true?
Someone who speaks Japanese will no doubt be in shortly with the specifics, but I’ll start by saying that Japanese uses pitch accent, not stress accent. Pitch accent means each syllable is essentially the same volume and lasts for the same length (though in Japanese they’re called morae (sing. mora) and “n” at the end of a syllable counts as a mora for these purposes). In English, or other stress accent languages, the stressed syllable is louder and longer than other syllables, and it changes the rhythm of the word.
In Japanese, each mora is the same length, but some are high and some are low. I don’t remember the rules for figuring it out, so someone else will have to chime in and explain the stress on Hiroshima. But essentially, yeah, the way an English word’s rhythm is changed my moving the stress around doesn’t really exist in Japanese.
I’m telling you, I don’t do that. If it’s after a “k” sound, or after a glottal stop (which I instinctively insert when I try to say “bla–jack” the voicing starts a little later, so it’s sorta more “chj” than just “j”, but the difference is subtle. (In SAMPA, that would be /tS3/ rather than /d3/ - but the difference is quite subtle.)
I don’t use “zh” (/3/) as an allophone of “j” (/d3/) ever in my speech, as far as I can tell. And I’m absolutely one-hundred percent positive that the “Beizhing” pronunciation is not due to normal allophonic variation. There are no other words where we substitute a “zh” for a “j” because it’s in intervocalic position. This is some widespread tendency to make “Beijing” sound more foreign, and it’s probably perpetuated by the media. (Granted, I’d say it’s the norm, so it’s not wrong per se - especially as, like I mentioned earlier, English speakers aren’t going to pronounce “bei3 jing1” correctly no matter how we try.)
I don’t think “thuh/thee” is allophonic variation either. Someone correct me if I’m wrong here, but this is basically the same as “a/an”, except spelling doesn’t reflect the change in pronunciation. The word has two alternate pronunciations depending on context, and it’s not the result of a systematic shift that “uh” (/@/, the schwa sound) undergoes.
Oh, but that’s nothing! There are much more extreme examples of this.
For example, the country of Hungary, in the native tongue is known as - get ready for this - Magyarorszag!!
For reference, in Polish it’s called “We,gry”.
Come on! I mean that’s not even close! How does this happen! Why can’t people refer to someome’s country by its native, proper name? What’s the reason for the changes anyways?
But they have “Chicken Madras”? :dubious:
I recall seeing a compilation of old letters to the Times of London. One writer harrumphed over an earlier wave of name-shifts, rhetorically asking if he should start referring to Iranian cats and Thai cats.
The word ‘Hungary’ predates the Hungarian nation:
Let’s not forget Ceylon, Abyssinia, the Voltaic Republic, Belorussia, …
Out of the frying pan, into the fire. 
According to this page, it was a case of misinformation and subsequent correction. The author was a radio announcer when the first atomic bomb was dropped on Japan. As he says:
I vaguely remember an episode of a TV program (I believe it was To Tell the Truth, as I seem to recall Garry Moore being the host) that featured a veteran of the Pacific Theater. Said veteran talked of “HiroSHEEma” being a beautiful city just before the bombing, and of “present-day HiROHshima” still bearing visible scars of the devastation. The host explained that the pre-bombing pronunciation had changed in order to emphasize the enormity of the impact of the debut of nuclear weaponry in combat.
If true, this would be somewhat analogous to the transition of Kenya from British colony (KEEN-ya) to independent nation (KEN-ya). I’ve heard that the impetus for this was the fact that Jomo Kenyatta, the first president of the republic, pronounced his surname ken-YAHT-a. At any rate, it’s wise to avoid the old pronunciation when visiting Kenya or talking to a Kenyan.
I took a photo safari in Kenya and Tanzania around 1974 and was kept in Tanzania for a while during a period when the border between Kenya and Tanzania was temporarily closed. (We had to be airlifted out.) Anyhow, we were told the same thing, that since Kenyatta was in power, the pronunciation was changed to agree with his surname. Since the time he left power, I’ve heard the pronunciation with a long e again. So I’ve since then pronounced it that way.
(to the tune of Maresy Dotes…)
Mao Zedong lives in Beijing
And not in Kampuchea
Kobble is how it’s said, not KaBOOL
To get back to the OP, there have been threads about this over the years (the search engine is working too slowly for me to try it right now).
What I recall from those threads regarding “why do foreigners call it something different?” include:
the infamous Cecil response where he cites “Germany” vs. “Deustchland” vs. “Allemagne” as essentially one tribe’s old way of saying “us”, or, “The Tribe” vs. other folks referring to that same group as “The Others,” “The Enemy,” etc…
The “Rome” vs. “Roma” dilemma - where a foreign reference is close-but-not-quite, there were a few forces thought to be at work:
> different language skills, vowel sounds, etc., so spelling and pronunciation are varied to account for this.
> political/colonial precedent - what a group in power referred to it as vs. the indigenous peoples (IP’s) - if the IP’s have since come to power, the name may evolve, but other countries may lag behind or be motivated for some reason not to update.
> a new language assumes power - e.g., in China with Mandarin vs. Cantonese, say - may lead to updated places names that sound similar. Again, other countries either may lag behind or be motivated for some reason not to update.
> “It was a bigger world back then” - in other words, back in the old days, we didn’t have immediate communications from other countries. We were more likely to have communications from our media sources, filtered and biased and potentially inaccurate in pronunciation or understanding of which options are most preferable. With today’s instantaneous global communications, these differences become much more clearly evident and also easier to rectify.
> Vowel shifts and such - language evolves. A placename may have been translated to English, say, so that it’s pronunciation aligns with the native sounds. However, over hundreds of years, both English and the native tongue are likely to evolve and the pronunciation of the placename can change, as can the pronunciation of the English word that had been used to approximate the earlier pronunciation - thereby doubling the “gap” between the native speakers’ and an English-speakers’ words for the same place. And once a specific spelling is adopted, it becomes very difficult to update that, even if it no longer is spelled like or sounds like a native speakers’ word for the place - it is, at least, internally consistent with the references to the same place in that same tongue.
I am sure there are other reasons, but these are the ones that come to mind from previous discussions.
Hope this helps,
WordMan
I found this on ABOUT: