Fun fact about Polish name for Germany. "Niemcy" etymologically comes from pre-Slavic word meaning "unable to speak/communicate". Ancient Slavs found German speech ununderstandable, gibberish and just decided "Yeap, those guys can't speak" and this just stuck around
Same with the Māori name of France (Wīwī), used because French sailors couldn't understand the language and answered to every thing the natives said with "oui, oui".
That's also how the Greek invented the word "barbarian" - those were people who only said "br br br". So basically the Slavs call us Germans barbarians xD
There's a lot of that going around. The names for Welsh and Wallachians comes from a Germanic root meaning "strangers". And a lot of the commonly-used tribal Indian names in America were nicknames (often unflattering) given them by *other* tribes. A la... "Hey who are those guys who live across the river?" "Jerks, that's who they are!"
@@Llortnerof Especially if you don’t know the writing system. For example, I’d only be able to read names using a variant of either the Latin or the Cyrillic alphabet.
Looking at YOU Turkey. The ü isn't used in English, so you can't tell us, "um yes we'd like to be called Türkiye," and expect us to know what that means.
It is enough to see the accents etc. in some names. When you extent this on cities, no one speaks about München and Köln aside from people german speaking. They speak of Munich and Cologne.
I wonder if part of the motivation behind them officially changing Turkey to Türkiye was that in English the word "turkey" is often more associated with a large bird that has nothing to do with the nation it is named after.
I think that's more Erdogan trying to use nationalism to make people overlook his other issues. I don't think using exonym for a word that is technically just phonetic writing of the endonym is really justified anyway.
I mean, context is a thing that exists, surely it's not too hard to understand the context the word "Turkey" is being used. By that logic Peru also would have to change it's name, since peru is portuguese for turkey.
In short, as long as an exonym is not deliberately derogatory or offensive then it should be kept. Languages are different for a reason and this should be appreciated. It is like asking to erase John, Juan, Ian... And replace them all with "Yohannan"!
Exactly. Poles have a reason for calling Germany something like "the mute ones", it would be senseless for them to call Germans "Deutsch" when that literally meant "the people". Countries have historic reasons for calling their neighbours what they call them - reasons just as important as the endonym. Maybe your neighbours are Brutish and constantly attack you. Maybe you call them "Twatians". Maybe you therefore name them after that fact. It would be bizarre if 2000 years later they politely ask you "please call us this word you've never used and actually means "super kind awesome people" in our language but means nothing in yours". No, just, use your exonym. Don't let other people decide what you should and shouldn't call other countries, it's cultural oppression.
@@calum5975 Also, In Poland, when Polish are using words with German endonym in casual conversation, its usually derrogative and most likely alluding to stuff from WW2.
@@vladprus4019 Basically all regional terms for Eastern European peoples in Austrian German are outright slurs, usually going back to anti-immigration sentiment from either 1850-1900 or 1960-1990. Wouldn't be pretty to use those instead of the native/latinized terms.
Pronounceability is a big factor. I have no idea how to pronounce a lot of endonyms. It would be a bigger problem if the language is tonal. I note as far as the -land suffix goes, England in French is Angleterre, so it's just a translation.
I think funny that in Portuguese, England is the only country that has a translated suffix. It becames Inglaterra. But other countries like Thailand, simply are Tailândia, with 2 suffix of place (land + ia) so Thailand in Portuguese is basically "land of land of Thai"
6:39 Japanese doesn't lack an "l-like sound"; it doesn't distinguish between /l/ and /ɹ/. If you ask a japanese to pronounce "l" they would just pronounce it as something between /l/ and /ɹ/.
@@semibioticThey distinguish, but differently. Historically all blue and green may be aoi, but since in even the fairly modern world (100 years ago maybe?) green can be called as midori. I am sure, that japans have their idea what exactly is midory, which may not align with other languages' green thiugh. L and R? Because they don't really distinguish, at least in music, I hear both. Maybe it depends on where the singer is from, wether he/she pronounces harder R or soft R, which is almost like an L. However, they would have hard time to say "fRy a fLy" in any cases 😅
So if you say they don't have a hard R and a hard L but only a fusion or middle ground between them that implies they "lack an L like sound". The Statement isn't wrong.
I've heard some UA-camrs mess up the names of my country's neighbours, Lesotho and Eswatini. I couldn't imagine how they would attempt uMzantsi Afrika.
I say "Peking" because I can never get tones right in Mandarin. I learned the tones for Cantonese, which is where we got "Peking" from anyway. And it's an unaspirated P, as n French, not voiced like B.
@@kenaikuskokwim9694 Most attempts just leave me rolling my eyes, but I buy 'em. I thought "Bombay" was a pronunciation of the Portuguese "bom bahía" (beautiful bay), but I could be wrong. Still, what's the likelihood that "Mumbai" is the original name -- it sure sounds like the Portuguese. Another one I don't know how to handle is the Peking mentioned above. In recent years, people say "Beijing duck". Okay, I'll give that one a pass too -- but what about my Pekingese dog? Is that to become Beijingese as well?
I think if a country formally requests other countries to change an exonym which is nothing like the original, the other countries should be allowed to create a new version of the endonym which conforms to the language rules / pronunciation. For this reason, I personally don't like Turkey being changed to Türkiye in English, because it just doesn't really fit and uses characters English doesn't really use. Also, not everyone wants other countries to use endonyms. As a Dane, I really dislike hearing Danish words (even pronounced correctly, which most likely won't happen,) in other languages, because it just doesn't fit in. I would hate to hear people say "I just went to København this Summer" as opposed to "I just went to Copenhagen this Summer" for this reason, and should our government formally request other countries to call our capital København, I'll continue to call it "Copenhagen" in English.
@@DogDogGodFog I feel that the idea of "getting rid of exonyms" is entirely misplaced. If a country wants to change its name or make exonyms align with the original as much as possible while still fitting the target language, I'm for it, but just saying it's disrespectful to use exonyms on behalf of others seems more disrespectful to me.
The Turkey/Türkiye/Turkiye thing is only changed to distinguish it from the bird turkey, so i guess thats reasonable since the pronounciation doesnt change and Turkiye is a valid change of spelling because it just adds 2 letters
@@ycasto1063 Perhaps Turkey/Turkiye did this because the word "turkey" had gained a pejorative sense in the English language as something awkward or ungainly, not just its previous sense as the game bird or farmed poultry. This is just a surmise on my part. Anyhow Turkey/Turkiye has its own bugs and distinguished features, as every land in the world does.
Perhaps the worst case of this is Ivory Coast, who insist on being called Côte d'Ivoire. I don't know a single language except for french that could possibly try to pronounce it without it being a complete slaughter of the name. Even french from France wouldn't pronounce it like the Ivorians do in their dialect, which also is a form of their colonizers' language, so which one is "correct"?
I don't think considering "Turkey" or "Tyskland" true exonyms is fair, because they stem from the same etyomological root as their endonym, they are just adapted for a diffrent language.
Yeah that'S right. On the other hand Tyskland and Deutschland got really far from each other over time. So in this case we still can treat it the same as exonyms.
I personally think that as long as we have different words for "mountain" or "man" there is no problem with calling countries by whatever exonym your language has for them.
Today we're dealing with issues of sometimes-cruel colonial legacies and how to live that down. We can strive to jettison old attitudes without dumping dignity altogether. However it got that way, and sometimes the sausage was very unappetizing to make, English in particular is become close to a universal language and its native speakers belong to countries with great geopolitical clout. We can but hope and pray God that we would use this clout wisely and considerately to good ends.
@SeekingTheLoveThatGodMeans7648 all those people crying about colonial names are just doing nationalist political stunts. The name India or at least variations of it, is much older than the British empire. It was just the generic name given to that part of the word by the West (and by West I mean mostly anywhere west of india). In arabic it's "Hind". Turkey's case is the stupidest thing ever. It's just regional adaptations of the same word. It comes from latin Turk-ia. I highly doubt that Turkiye has a turkish origin, I'm pretty sure it's an exonym. Erdogan just wanter to do a political stunt and acted offended that the country is being called same as a bird. But that issue is only in english, and the reason is because the bird was called after the country (which has to do with ancient trade routes and nothing more). Now for Myanmar, I beleive they completely changed the name of the country, including in the local language.
@@SeekingTheLoveThatGodMeans7648 English has advantages in structure with usually two forms of a noun, a singular and a plural form, and modifiers that don’t have to agree. However, standard English spelling is frozen in time but any attempt to make a non-phonetic language into a phonetic language just creates more confusion. English is probably not a good example of a base language. I’m an Australian speaker of English and spelling can be hard for many native speakers. So what happens next? English is the language of the colonisers, which is how it became so widespread, and it has some technical advantages by limiting the need for internal agreement. So could an English version of each endonym work as a Lingua Franca exonym, so that they are all based in the same foreign language, English? For example: India > Barath. Would English use the letter H or drop it? I’m not sure of the correct pronunciation, but if it is not pronounced with English ‘TH’ but is ‘T’ or ‘D’ or ‘Dh’, would it be better to represent the sound instead of the character spelling?
@JamesDavy2009 endonyms are usually the name used by the locals shen using their local language. I don't see what's special about those Australian towns.
We can't stop using exonyms. Not those like "Italia" in Italian and "Italy" in English. Even if we try, we will pronounce the names wrong if we don't speak the language properly. For example: In the video, "Deutschland" is not pronounced the way German would pronounce it. So technically it is still an exonym.
Mispronouncing a name accidentaly is not an exonym. Also people learn when they are taught. Before in Finland we used to localice names of leaders of the world. For example we would call and write "Charles" "Kaarle" the prononciation was entiry different made for Finnish mouths. Now that people are educated better, we have started to peoples real names and their real prononciations. Charles is Charles and München is München. The question is should we abaddon exonyms? Sometimes yes and sometime not. For example in Finland we call Belarus "White Russia". This should be changed closer to the original name. Then England is Englanti, so basically same, we just replace the "d" so it is easier to use in our sentences. In Finnish we don't end words on "d"s. These kind of exonyms should not be changed.
@@Ostvalt We still do that with Popes-- he's "Francis" in English, "Franziskus", "Franciszek", and "Francesco" in the tongues of his immediate predecessors, "Francisco" in his birthplace, and "Franciscus" in his new home. We do this with saints as well. The Kings of both Spain and the UK are "Carlos" in Spanish publications, and Elizabeth II was "Isabella". I think they still refer to "Carlos Marx".
@@Ostvalt BTW. Belarus literally means "White Russia" in White Russian (bela = бела = white and rus = русь = guess what) , so it changes absolutely nothing wrt. Russia. The renaming is just some b.s. from a dictator to feel important ... just like it is with Erdogan and his re-branding to Türkiye.
@@snygg1993 It is not renaming as Belarus is the name that they use and have used. Also Belarus doesn't translate to White Russia, but to White Rus. Russians have tried to destroy their identity, lets not do the same. If they don't want to be Russian, let them be Belarusian.
I am from Polska. Now I am in Sverige. I traveled through Deutschland and Danmark. My neighbor is from Shqipëri. I love Suomi/Finland. My cousin works in België/Belgique. My other cousin works in Norge/Noreg. My other cousin is on vacation in Suid-Afrika/South Africa/uMzantsi Afrika. My sister, who is a great traveler, has been to Sakartvelo and Hayastan.
And now I don't have any Idea what the last ones are. Why not just use the words a language already has agreed upon, so people who haven't got a PhD in Toponomy or Geography also get to know what you are taliking about. I only know the Albanian one because I was researching if they speak an indogermanic language
More unsolicited Finnish info: some countries and capitals are homonyms of everyday words, such as Peru - delete or abort Lima - phlegm or slime Malta - hold your horses Val(l)tta - lying Ankara - severe Turkki (Turkey) - fur coat Puola (Poland) - spool Varsova (Warsaw) - giving birth to a foal Norja (Norway) - limber
Varsova (Warsaw) - giving birth to a foal And people say German has hyperspecific words... Thinking about it, there actually is a word like that, "kalben", giving birth to a calf. I guess the one for foals just isn't as common.
I discovered that my grandfather and the Arabs in general before 1910 used to call foreign countries names different from the current names. For example, today we call Germany by the name that is used today is almaniya, but my grandfather used to call it (duitesheh:دُوِيْطِشَه), and France today is called farnsa, but the Arabs in the past were They call it (Franjieh:بلاد إفرنجه) and Spain today is called isbania, but in the past it was called (keshtalah:قشتالية)and so on, the old people still use these old names, But modern generations use modern names For countries.
@@איתןשיthat's not from ladino, it's just historic, referring to the kingdom of Castille, or Castela in Spanish, which was the biggest one of the Christians kingdoms in Iberia, and conquered most of the remannents of the Arabic speaking Al-Andalus. The same is for France as Faranji used to refer to the Francs, specifically those in the crusades
There are a few cities that get foreign names. Praha used to be Prag in Norwegian, like it's still Prague in English. These things often just change over time. When the name is perfectly pronouncable, it feels a bit odd and archaic to use such old names.
@@Mnnvint it's the famous saying, don't fix what is broken, also it was the Czech langauge that changed, the Name was Always Praga, but in Czech they lost the G sound in most words that then was transformed into H. So Praga -> Praha
That's a very valid point in many languages. I don't know how drastically things change in Gaeilge (I've tried learning a bit but I found it's more complex than I can learn on my own), but it it's something simple like a prefix/suffix change, that could be part of a compromise: you could use the closest approximation of the endonym as rendered in your language as the base name and then adapt it to fit the grammar cases as needed.
@@matthewluck9077I think he doesn’t look up the pronunciation of words before using them, it seems quite lazy. It’s kind of disrespectful since it seems he isn’t even making an effort to get the correct pronunciations
@@tomsmithok I agree. And if he doesn't know the pronunciation and doesn't want to look for it, then he shouldn't even try to pronounce the country in the native language
The problem with only using Endonyms is that several countries (DRC, Mali, South Africa, etc.) have multiple languages that all have loads of speakers, and it’d be difficult to choose which to use the endonym from.
@@Khloya69 That isn’t always easy to do. Take South Africa. If you go by native speakers the most spoken language is Zulu, but that’s still only 25% of the population. The name is essentially the same in every language, only translated for grammar (eg Suid Afrika in Afrikaans and iNingizumu Afrika in Zulu). Having no official endonym helps not show favouritism between languages.
I agree, but it caused postal problems. "Ivory" and "Coast" come out very different in various languages-- Elfenbeinküste in German, Bereg Slonovoy Kost' in Russian. Where Kost' means "bone", not " coast". East Timor and White Russia-- i.e., Belarus-- have the same problem.
@@kenaikuskokwim9694exactly. people only complain about ivory coast, meanwhile: belarus = white rusia ukraine = the border montenegro = black mountain venezuela = little venice etc.
It's because Ivory Coast has historically been called Ivory Coast. I still call it that. Any other name is gibberish in English. Besides some government somewhere has no right to impose speech--bad precedent.
It does but not (directly) to those in England but those who inhabited most of Northern Germany and traded and crusaded in the Baltics, interacting with the Finnic people. They are still called "saksit" in Finnish and the state of Saxony is "Saksi" (compared to "saksalaiset" and "Saksa" which is likely just a dialectal alteration).
@@ruedigernassauerno, the people did not move to the east. Only the title of chieftain or later king of saxons moved by heritage and marriage. The saxon people continued to settle in northern Germany, which is now called Lower Saxony.
04:53 "Bharat" sounds too similar to "Barata" that means "cockroach" in portuguese, some people, those braziliam that hate non europeam people, would love to use that name instead of "Índia".
I think we shouldn't stop using them, the act of abolishing them and using endonyms instead feels like a political move itself, trying to regulate how words should be in other languages. And I personally think it's nice to discover how your nation is called in another language, especially if it's something that differs from the endonym a lot. Plus since we live in the age where we could easily translate anything, why not include place names in that too? What actual benefit would there be if everyone called Finland as Suomi in their respective language? Should we also apply that to various regions, cities, rivers and so on?
@@Llortnerof It may end up being even more interesting exonyms. The type which have a shared written form (quite the challange for keyboards), but various pronunciation. It would give an easy comparison of pronunciation by different native speakers.
Burma is an alternative derivative of both mranma and brahma desha. The adjective Burmese is still used. The leader of Myanmar has stated that both are correct, and Myanmar is just a recent stylistic prefence. The names derive from Sanskrit and are far, far older than English.
It's a popular idea that the older form of the country's name - Mranma - comes from Sanskrit "Brahma desha" but it's more likely not. But yes, either Burma or Myanmar can be used, it just depends on register. Myanmar - mjəmà - is more literary and "upper" then Burma - bəmà.
A current dispute in the US is just what to call various Native American groups. Do you use the English version of what their neighbors called them, as with Sioux. Or Dakota, which is closer to what they call themselves? Of course, neither is quite right. It gets worse in Canada, with some groups coming up with names using transliteration schemes that are unpronounceable in both English and French.
@@ob_dowboosh As I understand it, Sioux is a French transliteration of an Ashinabe word for their neighbors (and enemies), meaning something like “the rattlesnakes”.
There's a people called Dogrib, which is a translation of the endonym. In Russian it's called Догриб, which is a transliteration of the translation, and so wrong. Either call them Собакоребреци or Псоребреци, or say Тлѧчѫ. And never mind that Russians don't yus those letters anymore!
One big point of exonyms that you have not mentioned is that the “original” name may change overtime due to political issues. E.g. former Belgisch Congo was changed to Zaire and then some decades latter back to Congo. Egypt is the English erosion of a name originating from Ancient Greece and Roman times way back in time before Arabic speakers settled there. Sometimes a country even may have benefits from a well established exonym, e.g. Made in Germany is globally accepted as something valuable, Hergestellt in Deutschland would sound rather strange in the Non-German speaking markets.
Like the whole Kiev/Kyiv thing exists because while Ukrainian pronunciation changed over time, Russian retained the name Ukrainians used to call it back in the day.
This is definitely the case with Korea, which derives from the ancient kingdom of Goryeo, whereas South Korea uses Hanguk referring to a slightly different set of ancient kingdoms, and North Korea uses Joseon, referring to a more recent dynasty. Which leads to the odd circumstance that Korea has *two* endonyms.
If the rule is ALWAYS endonyms, then we must spell Sumer in cuneiform and Khnum (Egypt) in Hieroglyphics, Hellas in Greek letters and Rossia in Cyrilic
I can see a few possibilities: 1. We rewrite exonyms to be as close to the endonym as possible. 2. We keep the status quo, but require that both endonyms and exonyms be taught in classrooms. 3. We let diplomacy do its thing, and we use either the UN or create a new treaty organization to standardize the names of countries in a legally binding resolution.
Who is the globalised "we" that you are referring to? It's crazy that any move towards a unified globalism would marginalise, suppress, and obfuscate various ethnic characteristics as already exercised by ethnic minorities-shouldn't these individual rights be upheld instead of slating them to be paved over by the royal "we" of globalism? I'd just say leave it all alone and let people stay free to exercise their own decisions within their own particular ethnic culture: which is to say, leave everyone to continue with free speech.
@@harrisonofthenorth please refer to my 2nd proposal. Just teach children the exonyms and endonyms in their geography classes. Just print the endonym on the map next to the exonym. Not that difficult.
4. Stop trying to "fix" something that isn't a real problem and would just make things worse. You won't pronunce most endonyms correctly anyway to the point where you're effectively still using an exonym.
@@Llortnerof I agree. Languages do "evolve". So, when a certain name is used often by the speakers, if exonym or endonym, it will be used. Pressing thing into a language is seen very poorly by me at the time.
3:32 it's curious how in some languages we have both "land" and "ia" suffix placed together in a lot of country names. In Portuguese for example, Thailand is called Tailândia, that literally means "land of land of Thai" (yes, 2 times)
Burma is not problematic at all. It in fact derived from Burmese. A lot of Burmese prefer the name Burma as the military dictatorship changed the country’s name to Myanmar, so many political and ethnic opposition groups prefer Burma. It does show the point of what endonym to use. However- that problem would not apply to places such as the US or Australia. Indigenous people usually did not have a concept of the entire country- only their own land. So there is no problem using the modern official name for the entire modern political nation.
Are exonyms causing a problem? As countries change their official names, it is sensible to change the names for formal matters, but below this does it really matter? To carry it through all the way, we would have to write, say, Bhaarat as भारत. How many alphabets are we all going to have to learn?
Probably a lot as that's not how the country's name is spelled in the Gujarati alphabet or in the Punjabi alphabet (actually, Punjabi has two scripts, the Arabic-based Shahmukhi script and a Sikh-derived script, Gurmukhi) or in Bengali. And, not even all languages native to India use "Bharat": In Tamil, the country is "Intiya" (and Tamil has its own script as well). There are, after all, 22 languages recognized in India as official using 12 different scripts.
@@josephwest124 And Intiya is either the root or a cognate of "India", so you could say that the exonym is just a pronunciation adaptation for ease of use of a valid endonym.
We also have "हिंदुस्तान" (Hindustan) as an endonym for India. And भारत ("Bharat"; even though the second a in "Bharat" is heavily misleading when it comes to pronunciation, but whatever), Hindustan, and India are names commonly used by us Indians (well, at least by us North Indians).
For some countries it is an issue. I imagine that over time more countries will ask we use their endonym as the word they want to be used. A few countries have already done this - Turkiye, Cote D’Ivoire, Timor Leste, Cabo Verde for example. It is not that hard to use these names not the English. If India wants to be referred to as Bharat, then that is something we can get used to. Schools will start using that and in 20 years it will be common place.
To be fair this exclusive to the English language. Because English is now the global language, we have all made English "our language", sort of. And we'd like to hear the name of our country/city pronounced our way in English. Nobody cares about french or spanish speakers saying Pekin instead of Beijing
Even though English pronunciation of Beijing isn't accurate and Pekin is an attempt to be closer to the Chinese pronunciation. Petching would be closer.
So how do you feel about "France" versus "France"? Let me IPA: "frɑːns" versus "frons"? It gets even trickier with East Asian languages that need inflection to denote meaning, a surprising amount sometimes. We're pretty keen on dropping "Peking", but how many people are too lazy to say "Beijing"? (Hint: There's no "sh" or "jh" sound in there - it's not a French word!) But where do we draw the line? Can some words be deemed "too hard, impossible" because of the sounds they use? What if some native speakers can't say "θ" - not a problem for Nederland or Thailand, or even Lesotho, but what about "Ethiopia" or "Athens" for that matter?
I think the only realistic change is that if a country finds itself wanting a new name, they must go through the process of having it officially changed, like Burma > Myanmar. Then, with the new name, each language is responsible for either adopting the endonym or (in the case that it conflicts with pronunciation/spelling) come up with a suitable exonym for it. Ideally the exonym should be identifiable enough to the endonym in my opinion, so Germany/Deutschland wouldn't fit, instead turning into the perhaps unfortunately confusing "Dutchland". Personally I disagree with Turkey changing to Türkiye in English. The umlaut Ü is not a feature of the English alphabet, so it is extremely out of place. It also doesn't feel necessary to maintain the spirit of the name. Turkiye or (perhaps easier for English speakers) Turkiya, I think would be appropriate exonyms.
"Turkiye" is already accepted if ü is not supported by keyboards etc. But according to the ISO 3166-1, Türkiye's English name is Türkiye. With the letter "ü"
To add on that discussion: In the indigenous language of central Cameroon, Éwondo, France is called Plési (with voiceless "s"). It is not an exonym. It is the French pronunciation of "France" transliterated into to the sound inventary of Éwondo. An "f" gets replaced by a "p", an "r" by an "l", the nasalized "an" becomes plain "é" and an additional "i" has been fumbled at the word´s end.
The United Kingdom is still referred to by its pre-1801 name, Great Britain, in Swedish. Growing up I had always assumed that they were synonyms, and only later realized Swedes never bothered updating the exonym.
I think a halfway measure, whereby people used as many endonyms as possible. The ones that are reasonable within language groups. e.g. Italia, is easy for German (Italien) French (Italie) English (Italy). In Mandarin, Japan is ribenguo (land of the rising sun) and nippon/nihon mean origin of the sun. So you could argue that is the same name. If you say nihon in mandarin (it can easily be heard as nihong) it would mean "you are red" or "fat is overflowing" depending on the tone.
There are a few countries, such as Central African Republic, that need to be translated simply because they have very specific words in their names. But on the other hand, "Netherlands" is often translated to something like "low land" in other languages. I think there should be a mix of endonyms and exonyms, depending on the wants and needs of the people living in that place and the speakers of the various languages. Korean, for example, has no "F" sound, so Fiji becomes "Pi-Ji", and no "V", so Vietnam becomes "Beh-Teu-Nam".
Plenty of exonyms are just older variants of endonyms. Or in case of Japan its because they insisted on writing the meaning of their name using chinese characters which was then read based on a certain chinese dialect from a region that regularly interacted with Japan. Many supposed Endonyms are refering just to parts of the country or single groups of people. Or in case of Myanmar it replaced the word the people actually used with the "correct" way that was mainly used in writing. Closer to my home some cities have english names which conserve the names from before the native low saxon was replaced by high german and I must say, Brunswick is a better name than Braunschweig. The only cases I support the switch is when for some reason only a formal name is used (Czech Republic instead of just Czechia) or if the name is based on a slur from a neighbor. And the city of Nissa should be named using the local dialect, hearing about the Nice attack was unnecessarily funny for what happened.
try this: The name I use for a certain west Pacific geological feature is, “Beautiful Sweet Potato Island.” It is an island, obviously. It is shaped like a sweet potato. Formosa in Portuguese, Hermosa in Spanish, and Taiwan in native Siraya all translate into English as, “Beautiful.” Beautiful Sweet Potato Island is not immediately politically prejudiced. (Except for the proposed flag containing a green sweet potato outline.)
No, we shouldn't. Maybe the major ones, but I don't think a name ending in -y or -ie causes much confusion. Names also need to adapt to the launguage's pronounciation. I can't imagine saying things like Magyarország all the time
its something I noticed quite young and I know the name of the 10 closest countries to my country in over 4 different languages and I never seen it as a problem, but am surprised that u only talked about name of countries and not cities, I live in belgium and there is 2 main languages and every single city in belgium has both a dutch and a french name which often have nothing in common
I find it interesting so that even though "Germany" was not a cohesive unit in the past and all of the surrounding peoples were interacting with different Germanic tribes, everyone was able to recognize the Germanic peoples of that region as a distinct enough entity that they needed to create their own word to describe those peoples as a unit.
We also similarly had/have words to collectively refer to Slavs as a whole. In Old German, they were called Wends. And in Old English, the were called Winds.
I feel like the easiest solution that could maintain cultural respectfulness while also maintaining pronounability would be to take the endonym of a country and alter it to be as close as possible to that original endonym into a new, similar exonym. Like with Peru, since it's already similar to the endonym, it could be left alone; meanwhile some words like Japan could be replaced with something like Nihone, or Germany with Dutchland. Of course this would be much easier if English used diacritics, but alas.
Okay, but I still support encouraging people in English to start using "Sakartvelo" for the country south of the Caucasus to avoid confusion with the US state of Georgia.
Many exonyms result from adaptations based on phonetics. When you hear a Swahili person say Kanada or a Belarusian say Канада, it sounds very much like a Canadian saying Canada. In many languages a C is never hard like a K, so if you change the spelling you will end up with a different pronunciation in different languages.
No. If some countries ACTUALLY PREFER to be addressed internationally using one set of phonetic and morphologic unit, they can. but to enforce it across languages with no regards for their phonotactics would just be overkill. especially if some countries did not even think of this as an issue.
It reminds me of Iran's language. Some in the west prefer to call it Farsi (the name in its language) but Iran asks for people to call it Persian because of cultural connotations of "Persian" (art, splendor, conquest, etc). Meanwhile, Farsi doesn't mean anything, so it feels like it undersells the potency of the language.
It's not just language issues, but even accent issues. For example the host of Name Explain has an accent where he says "TH" as an "F", and usually appends "were" to the last word of a sentence. Listen to the last 2 words in this video at 13:16 he says "Fank You-were" (instead of "Thank yoo"). So the country of (say) "Lesotho" probably would be said "Leso-fo-were", so it's not just language barriers (such as with Japanese and "L" sounds) but accent barriers too to be able to say the endonym.
@@JamesDavy2009 ok I gave a bad example. My point is still that accents might deviate from a globally agreed name, even if language difficulties like Japanese and "L" were worked around.
As someone learning other languages, learning the endonyms are basically a requirement for at least halfway sounding native. However, as someone that knows that countries are willing to completely rename areas, for good as mentioned in the video but also for ill such as China renaming what they've conquered of Tibet (already an exonym) to Xizang in an attempt to normalize their holdings, it's good to at least have a cultural and historical reference point that everyone agrees on, even if you might not use it when it can get you into hot water politically or legally when visiting.
Abandoning exonyms would create a double standard. Some are easy to pronounce like Türkiye, Bharat or Sakartvelo, but then you get to the interesting ones like "al-ʾimārāt al-3arabiyya l-muttaHida" (United Arab Emirates) where the 3 and H represent sounds not found in English (or many other languages for that matter). You could try approximating it but you would most likely mess up. I prefer foreigners saying "Hungary" rather than trying to say "Magyarország" and butchering it.
Getting rid of exonyms should be done on a case by case basis. Changing Bombay to Mumbai in people’s minds is easier than trying to teach people how to make a new sound in an unfamiliar language. It would be one thing if we all spoke and read the same language, but we don’t. An added complication to this is what do we do about writing systems? For languages that use the Latin alphabet, we don’t all use them the same way. Between Indian languages in the US and Polish, the letters don’t always make the same sound. So if we were to get rid of endonyms, do we transliterate them all to make them easier to pronounce, or do we all have to start learning bits of other languages writing systems? It’s kind of pointless for most people to know the Ł in Łodz makes the W sound, not an L, and that’s assuming you speak English. God help you if Mandarin is your native language.
I'm curious now, if English speakers were to use the endonyms of a country that uses a gendered language (not sure if that's the correct term) would the English speaker include the gendered article or not. For example, would we call it "La France" or just "France" with a French accent?
And how should other languages deal with pronounciation and spelling differences? Should Czechs write United Kingdom and remember it's pronounciation or should we write it Junajted Kingdom?
Consider this: If your native language is Japanese, how would you write the endonym "United Kingdom"? Japanese doesn't have an "ng" phoneme, and japanese characters (except for n) end in vowel sounds. In reality, Japan calls the UK "Igirisu", from Portuguese "Inglês", and I've also seen "buritisshu" be used. If you wanted to transliterate "United Kingdom" to Japanese, it would be "Yunaitedo Kingudomu" (ignoring slight differences because I don't speak japanese well enough to do this properly. The point is it *has* to change to fit the writing system)
I do believe it is better to keep exonyms, as a South African I agree with the last point, as we do not have a single Endonym, but multiple, and it would definitely not go over well trying to decide which one to use
I'm personally of the opinion that exonyms are okay as long as they hew closely to the original endonym. It's unfair to expect any language to adopt new sounds, characters, or vowel stress patterns. At the same time, it'd be nice to recognize how the people of any nation refer to themselves. So, I'm all for India becoming recognized as Bharat, or Finland as Suomi. But something like turning Turkey to Türkiye is just a little on the nitpicky side.
I think hink we need to distinguish between translations and completely different names. For example, Italia, Italy, Italien, etc. are obviously all based on the same word root. The different languages only adjusted the word to their own linguistics rules. But Germany, Allemagne, Saksa, etc. are all completely different words. And neither one of them is the country's actual name. I do think that any country has the right to expect others to use its proper name. But I they should not attempt to enforce any one specific form of that name; especially because this specific form might be problematic for certain languages to pronounce or to write down.
Another reason why I don't support endonyms is because right now supporters for it almost always do so for overtly nationalistic reasons, often intended to exclude some people.
@@ruedigernassauer But nationalistic always push for the ethnicity, not for citizenship. For example, Nazis excluded lots of people that were born in Germany for generations because they were different from the "true Germans"...
It sucks when discussing history in other languages because it takes a while to realize that Christopher Colombus and Cristobel Colon are the same guy. Henry II and Henrique II (as opposed to the Henry II of England).
My english teacher ages ago taught me 'Never translate people's or location's names, that is weird as hell'. Nowerdays, they do that over all media. I was absolutely unable to read the German translation of 'A Song of Ice and Fire' because the names were all translated and came out stupidly silly. So it's a trend. Half a generation does translate names = uses exonyms, another hals a generaation does not = using endonyms, and back and forth and on and on depending on where you are, how old you are, which whom you talk and who taught you whatever language. In the end it comes down to personal taste.
11:55 I said the same thing about time zones. It can be confusing when a streamer says they'll be online at 3PM, and you have to remember where they live, so you can calculate the time difference.
Mandatory Finn self insert: we have very distinctive names for our neighbours and historical friends/foes: Sweden - Ruotsi Estonia - Viro Russia - Venäjä Germany - Saksa
This. Who is a Russian or Swede to tell Finnish people to please use our local, native name. Finland has very good reasons to call those countries what it calls them, reasons that go back in some cases millennia.
@@calum5975 russians and swedes just wont care at all, they dont have any inferiority complex about their country names. most of those who dont know already would react like "ah, cool, interesting, so that's how you call our country in your language" and this would be it
For this to work, you would need to transcribe the pronunciation into every language, because otherwise you'll have to learn the pronunciation independent of the spelling. Deutschland works in German, but not English, where it needs to be "Doitchlant' to give the closest pronunciation. Similar to Suomi to Swomi for English. Other examples are Armenia being Hayastan in English, but Hajastan in Germanic and Slavic languages, Hajasztan in Hungarian. So you still end up with different spellings, close spellings, but this is to achieve the closest pronunciation for each language, so you can just read it like any other word. Pronunciation will be off, but it's the best we can do.
@@Liggliluff "St" ist pronounced liked "sht" only at the beginning of words, behind a prefix ("stehen" and "bestehen"") or in combined words ("Handstand").
@@ruedigernassauer but it is start of a word: Stan, which would be like Stad right? Hajan-Stan. I understand that "Stan" isn't a German word, but the point of this was to treat it as a German word.
@@Liggliluff "-stan" has no meaning in German than that as a suffix of an oriental country like Pakistan, Afghanistan etc. The pronunciation is thus "staan", not "shtaan". "Stadt" (=town) on the other side can stand alone, so it´s always pronounced "sht...", also in compounds like "Friedrichstadt".
6:55 You're _really_ underselling how difficult Lietuva would be for a Japanese person to pronounce. Li -> there's no L -> Ri Tu -> while the T sound exists, but it can not be followed by a U, and it must become a CH -> also, the u isn't even exactly the same sound as the one we all use Va -> there's no V -> Ba Lietuva -> Riechuba (Though modern Japanese is definitely opening up to foreign sounds, it is a _slow_ process.)
@@JamesDavy2009 Realistically, it'd be something like that. But this video's prompt was about taking the words _exactly_ so we have to get as close as possible
Most of the time it's not an issue, much less a problem. In cases like Turkiye or India/Bharat, if they ask, sure why not? But if the locals don't complain, there's not much of a call to action. One problem though... how "authentic" are we supposed to get? Chinese for China is "Zhōngguó". Just between you and me, I have trouble with tonal values, as well as the 'r' in France. Should I fake a French accent when referring to the country?
I think there are some valid arguments for using endonyms, but overall I think exonyms will, in some form or another, be around indefinitely. I definitely understand how some countries don't like their exonyms, and that's perfectly valid, but at the same time it's a question of practicality and implementation. Specifically for France, whose population seems to abhor every English speaker's pronunciation of their country's name that isn't spoken in a perfect French accent, getting every English speaker to speak French isn't a realistic goal, but they would similarly struggle with saying "The United Kingdom" in an English accent or "Australia" in an Australian accent. Same as New Zealanders pronouncing "Magyarország" would have as hard a time as Hungarians pronouncing either "Aotearoa" or "New Zealand." Put simply, expecting every person in the world to pronounce every sound from every language just to properly learn a country's name is a very tall order and not likely to happen.
Fun Fact: "Deutsche" (Germans) comes from "Teutsche" comming from Teutons, it was a name of another German tribe, meaning "people", mockingly given by the Italians and we just ran with it.
The endonym of country with samurai and anime is properly written 日本, which obviously doesn't contain English letters. It's unreasonable to expect monolingual English speakers (let alone monolingual Arabic speakers) to be able to pronounce this. This is why I believe that exonyms are fine.
I strongly dislike prescriptivism, but sometimes it is useful to work out certain common rules to adhere to. Like stop using certain slurs and such. Gather, discuss, bring arguments, and maybe come to some agreement. It's not like Supreme Commitee had decided that words Korea and China is now outlawed, and the only True and Correct Way to reference respective countries is Hanguk and Zhonghua from now on. But if we agree that it is an issue, and raise awareness, within decades we might shift to new norms. After all, descriptivism and prescriptivism are linguistic terms. And the way we are addressing someone, what is respectful and disrespectful, is more of a political question. It's not like prescriptivist are holding you back from using offensive words and slurs all of the time. And it is descriptivist who would tell you what is considered disrespectful
@@laierr Of course I agree that slurs and such are things that can and should be eliminated, and that that process of elimination is not prescriptivism, but this video and many other discussions I think are. Your example of Korea and China works in favor of this because (to my knowledge) there is no one even proposing that either are offensive there. I’ve met many of both country and have never picked up any feeling of resentment for calling them their English names in English. The same goes for many exo-ethnonyms that micromanaging Anglos have almost universally agreed are passé like Indian, Gypsy, and Eskimo. Yes these changes (if they were to ever happen which I highly doubt) would be political, but their genesis is linguistic (or at least that bureaucrats manipulate linguistics for their own ends). After all they are still words that are the result of evolution and not decided by a committee if a commoner is using them as much as if a politician is using them. I will say though that if these changes catch on, then the prescriptivists effectively hack the natural development of language. Many modern features of English are purely the result of uptight grammarians furiously “correcting” spelling and syntax, like many of the words with useless silent letters and the rule that adverbs must only come after the verb it’s modifying. But if I were around in the 1600s, I would be poo-pooing the pedants all day. I, having traveled all over the world and tried to learn the sentiments of non-Anglo peoples, especially from the global south, choose to reject many of the “inoffensive” ethnonyms (which ironically are often the actual offensive ones). Funny you mention politics, because these manufactured changes are mostly political, and not in any altruistic way. Like Siam being renamed Thailand, a move that was meant only to distance a new regime from the previous, and which most people in the country at the time thought was stupid; Burma, which IS perfectly acceptable and makes much more sense in English than Myanmar which most Anglos can’t even pronounce, and laughably IS STILL USED IN THE NATIVE LANGUAGE, BURMESE; and most ridiculous, Türkiye, which only the most insane, frothing at the mouth nationalists and Erdogan cronies want.
I think sometimes people are too prescriptive in their descriptivism. It’s *true* that language is determined by its use. But, this doesn’t obligate us to oppose attempts to encourage one use over another. For example, because the word “literally” is now often used as an intensifier (in a way fitting a pattern that has happened with a number of other words before, e.g. “very”), and that is therefore one of the current meanings of the word, that *doesn’t* mean that I have to *like* it. And, indeed I don’t. And so, while I don’t call such usage “incorrect” (because that doesn’t make sense) I do give people a hard time about it when they use the word “literally” in a way I dislike. Descriptivism is a true description of how-language-works, but that doesn’t mean we should prescribe indifference towards changes to language use.
@@drdca8263 I agree mostly. I literally pull all of my hair out when people overuse the word literally. But the point of this video is very much textbook prescriptivism. The same people who espouse descriptivism are blind to the obvious prescriptive premise to this kind of discussion that is pseudo-altruistic (pseudo because next to no one actually wants these changes and the ones who do you will quickly find view language as handed down by decree).
What will you call Switzerland if you ditch exonyms? I have noticed that the names for most Latin American countries are the same in English as in Spanish, but with slight pronunciation differences. I guess this is because they are fairly new.
Exonyms are a *compliment*! Every two-bit village is called by its native name as no one ever bothered to come up with an alternative. Whereas *important* places need a convenient name in every language.
This is an incredibly uninformed take. Places with exonyms are not always neutral or positive in vibe. Just look at Japan's name history: it's original name that was given by China was more or less directly insulting the inhabitants. In a world filled with bloody history, a lot of people named places in various ways that designated them as "the enemy" or used some derogatory word used to belittle them, or have an offensive origin through ignorance
Very few exonyms are insulting, and those that are are often changed without issue-- Samoyed to Nenets, Eskimo to Inuit. The Slavic name for Germans is an insult, but the Germans don't deign to care. "Deutsch" itself is awfully close to "deutlich", or clear. So they insult everybody!
4:48 I'm pretty sure that country only wanted to change the English exonym to try to avoid the constant jokes; the Turkish name is not used in non-English, non-Turkic languages. The Netherlands would be a bit closer to the fact, but what they've done is to ask to change the exonyms from the Holland-based to the Netherlands-based (i.e. to use however "nether lands" is said in the local language instead of variations of "Holland"; since they cannot force the issue, many speakers have not adopted the new exonyms, and Japan as a country hasn't bothered to change it). 8:32 one could argue that that's what happens with the capital of the People's Republic of China: the traditional English word "Peking" is just an slight adaptation (tone deletion) of one of the valid endonyms, and if we go for the most common endonym (once tones have been removed), it would be either "Pechin" or "Peching"; the currently favoured exonym "Beijing" is just the adaptation (tones-yadda-yadda) of the Mandarin endonym, which is the most unique one (as far as I know, the most evolved and the farthest from the original pronunciation). If we went with the traditional rules used in China before all the cleansing attempts, the correct exonym should be literally "North Capital", as they accepted any local pronunciation of 北京.
Peching and Beijing are different romanizations of the same sound. One interesting phenomenon is that Taiwan actually officially switched to using pinyin for placenames, but big cities like Taipei and Kaohsiung keep their old romanizations (instead of Taibei and Gaoxiong in pinyin), and I'm guessing using the pinyin version would be seen as being pro China taking Taiwan...
@@maxxiong I went to check wikipedia's pinyin article to see how could that be possible, and once read, let me get this straight: the imposition of "Beijing" pronounced as is is, in fact, forcing us to call the city by the wrong name just because in their standarization they gave different values to stablished letters, and forcing us to match the writing makes us mismatch the sounds? I'll keep using "Peking", thanks, which is still an endonym (albeit slightly mispronounced due to my language using tones for expressivity instead of word differentiation).
@@jorgelotr3752 "Peking" is not even mandarin. "King" is not a valid sound in mandarin. This comes down to how people perceive sounds. Mandarin does not distinguish between b and unaspirated p. English does not distinguish between unaspirated and aspirated p. The normal aspiration rules for English would make the p in "peking" aspirated. It sounds fine to an English ear but not a Chinese ear. By your logic, names in other latin alphabet languages (especially something like Polish) should be respelt to fit English rules and no one does that.
@@maxxiong I said "an" endonym, not "the" endonym. That word (at least in the intermediate language English "borrowed" it from, with the "e" being read like an "eh" or an "ay") is very close to the reading of the characters in the modern languages of Cantonese (the "e" in this case is way more open), Hakka (doubling the k) and Eastern Min (the "e" more open, but less than in Cantonese), and it's technically quite period-correct for the time it entered European languages (17th century). Were I to use the most common appelation (the Mandarin name), I would use something closer to the real pronunciation (Pei CHING, with a brief space inbetween) instead of the enforced English pronunciation (quite weird that a language for which the relationship between writing and reading is but an educated guess gets so bent in reading the word wrong to match the expected result).
My personal take on this is to use exonyms but still try to use endonyms whenever I can. As German wouldn’t judge people for not knowing the endonym for our country. But it’s always nice to hear people making the effort, atleast trying to say it correctly. I.g. I appreciate people trying to speak another language for better communication. So out of respect I try to remember endonyms whenever I can. And as a history and linguistics enthusiast I feel this is a win win. But that’s my take. You do you
The issue is also that Germany is such a historically relevant place that it makes entire sense for different people to call it different things, and who is modern Germany as a country to tell say, the English that "uhhm actually, we'd like to be called Deutschland now, even in English". Firstly, Deutsch literally means something like "the people", which as you imagine is kinda meaningless for non Germans. Secondly, English already uses that word for the Dutch for our own historic reasons that matter to us. Thirdly, "Germany" is a very old name for the country which arguably is just as valid as Deutschland and definitely more culturally and historically important for English speakers than "Deutschland" is. No one is getting confused over this either. It just feels very very condescending and rude to believe your endonym is any more valid than another people's exonym in general, right? German history has impacted more people than just Germans.
One problem with trying to use endonyms is that modern countries do not always fit neatly into older geographical concepts. Australia has multiple indigenous languages, but I doubt there is one that has a word that matches with the concept of the current nation. Similarly native American tribes will not have had a name specifically for Canada, the United States or nay other modern country. (There is also the question of whether a city should have the same name as the native land on which it was built, especially when it expands and encroaches onto other named areas.) Regarding other countries insisting on using their preferred endonym, we have adapted to Myanmar and Sri Lanka (though our accents may butcher those names), but for Turkey to insist that we start using diacritics, which are virtually unknown in English may be going a step to far. I don't even know how to type these letters.
Los humanos siempre pronuncian las cosas como les suenan, si de desgarran las vestiduras por eso, aunque se establezcan los endónimos se van a acaban modificando.........
It's true that exonyms can bring you to political water and what not, like how the Sanskrit "cina" became one of the roots for China, to refer to the country Zhongguo, which ended up transliterated by the Chinese as 支那(Zhina). It became a neutral term to refer to mainland China, originally in ancient Indian and Chinese Buddhist texts, but during and after the Second Sino-Japanese war, the term 支那(pronounced "shina" by the Japanese) became derogatory. In modern times, 支那 was used by Hong Kong and Taiwanese independence activists as a slur against mainland China. But I do agree with the existence of exonyms because that's how people become used to calling countries. Getting rid of exonyms is like forcing the USA to get rid of the imperial units in favor of the metric ones, like kilometers instead of miles, centimeters instead of inches, meters instead of feet, etc. If that were the case, they would have to get rid of everything like changing the speed limits and everything, and replacing them is going to take a very long time, and Americans would have to throw the imperial system out of the window, and learn the metric ones, which can be a headache for them. Dad also mentioned about how the imperial system has its own benefits like how the units are very easy to divide, like how a foot is exactly 12 inches, and what not. Exonyms should be allowed, as long as it's not made to be used as a derogatory slur to other countries, like calling it a "dog water country".
We should start using endonyms. The Soviet Union did so too and it worked. Don't know why people make an issue out of it and say "No, this is way too confusing!" when we l'Italy can become polyglots. A few words won't hurt you. Their arguments also doesn't make any sense. Just because exonyms develop doesn't mean we should use them and no, they aren't really a solution to foreign languages, there's no explanation given by those who say so why this is the case
as an english native who is interested in other languages I find the idea of modifying a languages proper names just for the sake of pronunciation ease to be a lazy and disrespectful method of engaging with another language. Its not hard to learn an accent, figure out how to make non-native sounds from other languages, and generally be educated on how to pronounce most unfamiliar words. I'm fine with transliteration to make writing systems compatible, but effort should be made to come as close to the original sounding endonym as humanly possible. Using Rossiya in English writing and speaking to refer to Россия. is totally acceptable. But calling Deutschland Germany or Nihon Japan makes absolutely no sense to me.
Because English is the world's global language, countries care way more about what we call their country than what the country's name is in Albanian. That's why we have Ivory Coast, Turkey and the Czech Republic all trying to get their name in English changed. Or the Ukrainians caring that we call it Ukraine and not 'the Ukraine' or spelling their capital Kiev as Kyiv.
The thing is - exonyms make sense for the people saying them. English speakers have historic reasons for calling Germany "Germany", reasons that arguably are as valid as calling Germany "Deutschland". I dont think any country has the right to enforce its name on speakers of a foreign language. So what, in Scottish Gaelic they call England something like "Saxonland", that's a meaningful and historic name for them. It would be pathetic if England demanded Scottish Gaelic speakers started to call it England. Unless the name they're using is derogatory, and i mean in the sense its like actively insulting, not something like polish for Germany meaning "mute ones" because German is unintelligible for Poles, you frankly have no right to ask to be called something. Its not a personal name, its a country name, and countries matter to people outside of that country - not just those within it.
the main issue i see is: when places have multiple endonyms (because of multiple languages), which one do we use? also, some languages have sounds that other languages don't have. spain has ñ in its endonym. that sound (not 'ny', but [ɲ]) doesn't exist in english, for example.
@@LuchoCastle_11 lasagna is an italian word. unless the word is pronounced 'properly' (for lack of a better word) it will probably sound more like 'lazaniya'
Even within a single language it’s possible to have more than one endonym for a country, if the national language has more than one written standard, and choosing to use one over the other internationally can be a really charged issue, far more than letting other languages use their own version of the name.
@@cfgp English _can_ support an "ny" sound, like in the word "new". What? You don't hear a y-sound in that word? Oh ya, it was lost at some point in various accents. (Or maybe you _did_ hear the "y" sound, in which case you have an accent that doesn't do it in that word.)
@@ragnkja also the different “endonym” based on the “official” or “common” way of calling - Japan in Japanese can be both “Nihonn” (common pronunciation in everyday usage) and “Nipponn” (official pronunciation, as designated by the Ministry of Education, Culture, and Science; or in full, Nippon Koku--Nippon country)
Montenegro is just the latin / italian translation of Crna Gora. Black mountain. So translating the endonym into a 3rd language, Why not a random other, like montaigne noir, or Schwarzberg... this can be endless.
@@rumpelstilzz But that is exactly what the White Russian dictator did: he demanded to call White Russia as "Belarus" wich is just White Russia in White Russian (bela = бела = white and rus = русь = guess what)
Exonyms can be more enduring than endonyms as Country X may persist in using an exonym for Country Y while the Country Y changes its name several times. Kountry Y, Kountri Y, Kuntri Y, Kuuntri Y, and finally glottal stop Y. Or Asia to Turkey to Turkiye.. and several distinct city states in Asia had their own names for the peninsula.
@@ruedigernassauer you bring up another point, that many endonyms are difficult to pronounce in other languages and may be difficult or impossible to spell in foreign alphabets. Add that to the frequent changing of names. Also since even countries that share the same or similar alphabets often pronounce the letters or groups of letters differently similar spellings can yield diverse pronunciations and vice versa.
Anything that's difficult to pronounce will be slow. I still say Ivory Coast and East Timor because I've zero clue how to pronounce Côte d'Ivoire or Timor-Leste.
@@saisamsuri Portuguese has no recognized standard for pronunciation. Timor may be pronounced like Timor or like Timur, and Leste like Lesht, Leshte (schwa), Leshti or even Leshtchi. In Germany we say Osttimor (=East Timor). French pronunciation has a standard.
There's another, legal, reason to maintain endonyms. In many cases the formal recognition of one country by another is a matter of law, sometimes a treaty agreement. That means that the two countries may have formally agreed as binding international law to use designated endonyms and exonyms between themselves. A great deal of treaty law around customs and immigration simply assumes this to be the case and would need to be changed, which requires the participation of all nations and many treaty organizations.
Where do you come from? Where is your accent from? It seems that you sometimes attach an "eh" at the end of some words, e. g. language-eh, has-eh, Deutschland-eh, them-eh, people-eh, accord-eh, world-eh, too-eh
I think we should arrive to a compromise. Every language should use an exonym that resembles as closely as possible the endonym of a country while still being relatively easy to say and respecting the rules of the language. For English Perú would be called Peru as it’s currently called, Argentina would keep is endonym, and 日本 would be called Nihon instead of Japan.
I think keeping exonyms makes most sense because even if we did use endonyms we would likely still drift from the original after a significant period of time. That said, a nation electing to changing their name for diplomatic purposes and being adopted by the wider world makes sense like the Myanmar example, or how Thailand was once called Siam
@7:05 It’s ri-to-a-ni-a which is slightly closer to Lithuania when said properly. The Japanese r lies between the English r/l which is why it’s treated that way. The bigger issue with that country’s English name is the lack of “th” in Japanese. If going with the country’s language the v would be the biggest challenge in Japanese
The "th" sound would be transliterated as "s" or "z" depending on presence of voice. What name did they give to Mothra? "V" in Japanese is usually transliterated as "b" e.g. "Betonamu" for Vietnam.
@@JamesDavy2009 モスラ isn’t the best example. Sure, based on the English “moth” rather than the Japanese 蛾/が but given Godzilla is Gojira in Japanese, it’s more about they were making up names that sound “exotic” but are easy to say in Japanese. Going back to countries where names already exist and they’re being adapted, エチオピア/echiopia for Ethiopia shows chi being used in place of th, レソト/resoto for Lesotho shows both r/l and th omission like in Lithuania. And just forget anywhere “South” is in the name as Japanese is just gonna go, I got this, 南スーダン (literally south in Japanese then suudan for South Sudan). That is, the th-> su is when there is no vowel following the th while if a vowel follows then it’s generally たちつてと ta/chi/tsu/te/to Also, I’m aware of how V is handled, it’s just….
So... do you think we should stop using exonyms?
Of course not. They don't hurt anyone.
Only if the country asks.
@FlashThanim not seeing any news about it.
Unrelated the US has a ship named Helena which is nearly identical to the official greek name
You cannot say our endonym friendly; DaeHanMinGuk(S) or Choson Minjujui Inmin Gonghwaguk(N)
Nope
Fun fact about Polish name for Germany. "Niemcy" etymologically comes from pre-Slavic word meaning "unable to speak/communicate". Ancient Slavs found German speech ununderstandable, gibberish and just decided "Yeap, those guys can't speak" and this just stuck around
Same with the Māori name of France (Wīwī), used because French sailors couldn't understand the language and answered to every thing the natives said with "oui, oui".
Is ununderstandable a real word? Cool if it is
@@DrFerno727 Based Māori!
That's also how the Greek invented the word "barbarian" - those were people who only said "br br br".
So basically the Slavs call us Germans barbarians xD
There's a lot of that going around. The names for Welsh and Wallachians comes from a Germanic root meaning "strangers". And a lot of the commonly-used tribal Indian names in America were nicknames (often unflattering) given them by *other* tribes. A la... "Hey who are those guys who live across the river?" "Jerks, that's who they are!"
Will still need to transliterate. We can't type endonyms that use different writing sytems at the same time.
Not just type. Often, you won't even be able to pronunce it correctly because you don't know the phonemes.
@@Llortnerof
Especially if you don’t know the writing system. For example, I’d only be able to read names using a variant of either the Latin or the Cyrillic alphabet.
Looking at YOU Turkey. The ü isn't used in English, so you can't tell us, "um yes we'd like to be called Türkiye," and expect us to know what that means.
It is enough to see the accents etc. in some names. When you extent this on cities, no one speaks about München and Köln aside from people german speaking. They speak of Munich and Cologne.
@@Quintarus1794 It has become the official name
I wonder if part of the motivation behind them officially changing Turkey to Türkiye was that in English the word "turkey" is often more associated with a large bird that has nothing to do with the nation it is named after.
I think that's more Erdogan trying to use nationalism to make people overlook his other issues.
I don't think using exonym for a word that is technically just phonetic writing of the endonym is really justified anyway.
I mean, context is a thing that exists, surely it's not too hard to understand the context the word "Turkey" is being used.
By that logic Peru also would have to change it's name, since peru is portuguese for turkey.
@@legeul And what is Portuguese for Peru?
@@reddwarfer999Peru. Turkey is Turquia. The bird, turkey, is also peru.
@@reddwarfer999 It's Peru.
Name Explain butchering a bunch of endonyms in this video makes a great argument for exonyms.
Subtext: his butchering is an argument for exonyms. Enough said.
He butchered a lot of the exonyms too
@@RadenWA fr, what the hell is "pelu"
Actually butchering “Perú” takes a special kind of skill! 😂
@rashakor i thought knowing the accent emphasizes the vowel, not the damn opposite
bro that is the least accurate Peru pronunciation I have ever heard
I have no idea why he's using an L.
This guy has a track record of being bad at pronouncing foreign names lol
@@lihnsshouldnt make videos about geography then.
Yeah. His bad pronunciation is an argument FOR exonyms. Just say it in English if you're speaking English.
@@lihns Yeah, bro really said "doyshlahnde"
In short, as long as an exonym is not deliberately derogatory or offensive then it should be kept. Languages are different for a reason and this should be appreciated. It is like asking to erase John, Juan, Ian... And replace them all with "Yohannan"!
Exactly. Poles have a reason for calling Germany something like "the mute ones", it would be senseless for them to call Germans "Deutsch" when that literally meant "the people". Countries have historic reasons for calling their neighbours what they call them - reasons just as important as the endonym.
Maybe your neighbours are Brutish and constantly attack you. Maybe you call them "Twatians". Maybe you therefore name them after that fact. It would be bizarre if 2000 years later they politely ask you "please call us this word you've never used and actually means "super kind awesome people" in our language but means nothing in yours".
No, just, use your exonym. Don't let other people decide what you should and shouldn't call other countries, it's cultural oppression.
@@calum5975 But it would be senseful for them to call Germans "Dzieci" what means "children".
@@calum5975 Also, In Poland, when Polish are using words with German endonym in casual conversation, its usually derrogative and most likely alluding to stuff from WW2.
The unfortunate thing is that English already uses Deutsch, just for the wrong people, kind of.
@@vladprus4019
Basically all regional terms for Eastern European peoples in Austrian German are outright slurs, usually going back to anti-immigration sentiment from either 1850-1900 or 1960-1990. Wouldn't be pretty to use those instead of the native/latinized terms.
Pronounceability is a big factor. I have no idea how to pronounce a lot of endonyms. It would be a bigger problem if the language is tonal.
I note as far as the -land suffix goes, England in French is Angleterre, so it's just a translation.
I think funny that in Portuguese, England is the only country that has a translated suffix. It becames Inglaterra. But other countries like Thailand, simply are Tailândia, with 2 suffix of place (land + ia) so Thailand in Portuguese is basically "land of land of Thai"
@@yaagodourado Probably because the exonym is ancient, in time where everything is writed in latin and translated in another country from latin.
Even just completely ASCII-compatible names like "Hrvatska".
You very much do it even now. For example, you take the spelling, not pronunciation, for French, Yugoslavian words.
@@matt92hun Is the H a ch sound as in "loch"? I ask because 'cravat' as in necktie gets its name from Hrvatska (possibly spelt different at the time).
6:39 Japanese doesn't lack an "l-like sound"; it doesn't distinguish between /l/ and /ɹ/. If you ask a japanese to pronounce "l" they would just pronounce it as something between /l/ and /ɹ/.
I'm glad someone said this, I was thinking it as well.
Engrish :)
Also they don't distinguish blue and green colors, but do have several black ones.
@@semibioticThey distinguish, but differently. Historically all blue and green may be aoi, but since in even the fairly modern world (100 years ago maybe?) green can be called as midori. I am sure, that japans have their idea what exactly is midory, which may not align with other languages' green thiugh.
L and R? Because they don't really distinguish, at least in music, I hear both. Maybe it depends on where the singer is from, wether he/she pronounces harder R or soft R, which is almost like an L. However, they would have hard time to say "fRy a fLy" in any cases 😅
So if you say they don't have a hard R and a hard L but only a fusion or middle ground between them that implies they "lack an L like sound".
The Statement isn't wrong.
@@meinacco it's more like they don't distinguish r from l. you wouldn't be wrong if you pronounce an r as an l in japanese, or vice versa.
I'd rather hear people saying the exonym, rather than completely butchering the endonym
I've heard some UA-camrs mess up the names of my country's neighbours, Lesotho and Eswatini. I couldn't imagine how they would attempt uMzantsi Afrika.
@@Ryan-ho4hf It was fairly recently by comparison when Eswatini was still known as Swaziland.
I say "Peking" because I can never get tones right in Mandarin. I learned the tones for Cantonese, which is where we got "Peking" from anyway. And it's an unaspirated P, as n French, not voiced like B.
@@kenaikuskokwim9694 Most attempts just leave me rolling my eyes, but I buy 'em. I thought "Bombay" was a pronunciation of the Portuguese "bom bahía" (beautiful bay), but I could be wrong. Still, what's the likelihood that "Mumbai" is the original name -- it sure sounds like the Portuguese. Another one I don't know how to handle is the Peking mentioned above. In recent years, people say "Beijing duck". Okay, I'll give that one a pass too -- but what about my Pekingese dog? Is that to become Beijingese as well?
Most people saying "Beijjing"
I think if a country formally requests other countries to change an exonym which is nothing like the original, the other countries should be allowed to create a new version of the endonym which conforms to the language rules / pronunciation. For this reason, I personally don't like Turkey being changed to Türkiye in English, because it just doesn't really fit and uses characters English doesn't really use.
Also, not everyone wants other countries to use endonyms. As a Dane, I really dislike hearing Danish words (even pronounced correctly, which most likely won't happen,) in other languages, because it just doesn't fit in. I would hate to hear people say "I just went to København this Summer" as opposed to "I just went to Copenhagen this Summer" for this reason, and should our government formally request other countries to call our capital København, I'll continue to call it "Copenhagen" in English.
As a Pole, same. I'd hate it if everyone suddenly started calling Poland 'Polska' in English. It would feel very nonsensical and out-of-place.
@@DogDogGodFog I feel that the idea of "getting rid of exonyms" is entirely misplaced. If a country wants to change its name or make exonyms align with the original as much as possible while still fitting the target language, I'm for it, but just saying it's disrespectful to use exonyms on behalf of others seems more disrespectful to me.
The Turkey/Türkiye/Turkiye thing is only changed to distinguish it from the bird turkey, so i guess thats reasonable since the pronounciation doesnt change and Turkiye is a valid change of spelling because it just adds 2 letters
@@ycasto1063 Perhaps Turkey/Turkiye did this because the word "turkey" had gained a pejorative sense in the English language as something awkward or ungainly, not just its previous sense as the game bird or farmed poultry. This is just a surmise on my part. Anyhow Turkey/Turkiye has its own bugs and distinguished features, as every land in the world does.
Perhaps the worst case of this is Ivory Coast, who insist on being called Côte d'Ivoire. I don't know a single language except for french that could possibly try to pronounce it without it being a complete slaughter of the name. Even french from France wouldn't pronounce it like the Ivorians do in their dialect, which also is a form of their colonizers' language, so which one is "correct"?
I don't think considering "Turkey" or "Tyskland" true exonyms is fair, because they stem from the same etyomological root as their endonym, they are just adapted for a diffrent language.
Yeah that'S right. On the other hand Tyskland and Deutschland got really far from each other over time. So in this case we still can treat it the same as exonyms.
Exactly Switzerland has 4 Endonyms, which one should you use?
The Latin one, Helvetica. Or the full CH.
@@Alias_Anybody But is that an endonym, i think not because its Latin
@@Alias_Anybody Not an endonym, Latin colonialism.
@@sarban1653
The Romans were long gone when Switzerland was founded. They picked that one themselves.
@@Alias_Anybody Internalized colonialism.
I personally think that as long as we have different words for "mountain" or "man" there is no problem with calling countries by whatever exonym your language has for them.
Today we're dealing with issues of sometimes-cruel colonial legacies and how to live that down. We can strive to jettison old attitudes without dumping dignity altogether. However it got that way, and sometimes the sausage was very unappetizing to make, English in particular is become close to a universal language and its native speakers belong to countries with great geopolitical clout. We can but hope and pray God that we would use this clout wisely and considerately to good ends.
@SeekingTheLoveThatGodMeans7648 all those people crying about colonial names are just doing nationalist political stunts. The name India or at least variations of it, is much older than the British empire. It was just the generic name given to that part of the word by the West (and by West I mean mostly anywhere west of india). In arabic it's "Hind". Turkey's case is the stupidest thing ever. It's just regional adaptations of the same word. It comes from latin Turk-ia. I highly doubt that Turkiye has a turkish origin, I'm pretty sure it's an exonym. Erdogan just wanter to do a political stunt and acted offended that the country is being called same as a bird. But that issue is only in english, and the reason is because the bird was called after the country (which has to do with ancient trade routes and nothing more). Now for Myanmar, I beleive they completely changed the name of the country, including in the local language.
@@SeekingTheLoveThatGodMeans7648
English has advantages in structure with usually two forms of a noun, a singular and a plural form, and modifiers that don’t have to agree.
However, standard English spelling is frozen in time but any attempt to make a non-phonetic language into a phonetic language just creates more confusion.
English is probably not a good example of a base language. I’m an Australian speaker of English and spelling can be hard for many native speakers.
So what happens next?
English is the language of the colonisers, which is how it became so widespread, and it has some technical advantages by limiting the need for internal agreement. So could an English version of each endonym work as a Lingua Franca exonym, so that they are all based in the same foreign language, English?
For example: India > Barath. Would English use the letter H or drop it? I’m not sure of the correct pronunciation, but if it is not pronounced with English ‘TH’ but is ‘T’ or ‘D’ or ‘Dh’, would it be better to represent the sound instead of the character spelling?
@@tonymouannes Two places in Australia adopted dual names with locals preferring to use the endonym: Uluru/Ayers Rock and K'gari/Fraser Island.
@JamesDavy2009 endonyms are usually the name used by the locals shen using their local language. I don't see what's special about those Australian towns.
We can't stop using exonyms. Not those like "Italia" in Italian and "Italy" in English. Even if we try, we will pronounce the names wrong if we don't speak the language properly. For example: In the video, "Deutschland" is not pronounced the way German would pronounce it. So technically it is still an exonym.
Mispronouncing a name accidentaly is not an exonym. Also people learn when they are taught.
Before in Finland we used to localice names of leaders of the world. For example we would call and write "Charles" "Kaarle" the prononciation was entiry different made for Finnish mouths.
Now that people are educated better, we have started to peoples real names and their real prononciations. Charles is Charles and München is München.
The question is should we abaddon exonyms? Sometimes yes and sometime not. For example in Finland we call Belarus "White Russia". This should be changed closer to the original name. Then England is Englanti, so basically same, we just replace the "d" so it is easier to use in our sentences. In Finnish we don't end words on "d"s. These kind of exonyms should not be changed.
@@Ostvalt We still do that with Popes-- he's "Francis" in English, "Franziskus", "Franciszek", and "Francesco" in the tongues of his immediate predecessors, "Francisco" in his birthplace, and "Franciscus" in his new home. We do this with saints as well. The Kings of both Spain and the UK are "Carlos" in Spanish publications, and Elizabeth II was "Isabella". I think they still refer to "Carlos Marx".
@@Ostvalt BTW. Belarus literally means "White Russia" in White Russian (bela = бела = white and rus = русь = guess what) , so it changes absolutely nothing wrt. Russia.
The renaming is just some b.s. from a dictator to feel important ... just like it is with Erdogan and his re-branding to Türkiye.
I think people need to just get over their skill issues and call things what they are called by the people who inherit it
@@snygg1993 It is not renaming as Belarus is the name that they use and have used. Also Belarus doesn't translate to White Russia, but to White Rus. Russians have tried to destroy their identity, lets not do the same. If they don't want to be Russian, let them be Belarusian.
I am from Polska. Now I am in Sverige. I traveled through Deutschland and Danmark. My neighbor is from Shqipëri. I love Suomi/Finland. My cousin works in België/Belgique. My other cousin works in Norge/Noreg. My other cousin is on vacation in Suid-Afrika/South Africa/uMzantsi Afrika. My sister, who is a great traveler, has been to Sakartvelo and Hayastan.
And now I don't have any Idea what the last ones are. Why not just use the words a language already has agreed upon, so people who haven't got a PhD in Toponomy or Geography also get to know what you are taliking about. I only know the Albanian one because I was researching if they speak an indogermanic language
@@PropagandalfderWeiße sakartvelo is georgia, hayastan is armenia
South African here. We usually shorten "uMzantsi Afrika" to just "Mzansi"
Great point!
HAYASTAN MENTIONED 🗣️🔥🔥🙏🙏
More unsolicited Finnish info: some countries and capitals are homonyms of everyday words, such as
Peru - delete or abort
Lima - phlegm or slime
Malta - hold your horses
Val(l)tta - lying
Ankara - severe
Turkki (Turkey) - fur coat
Puola (Poland) - spool
Varsova (Warsaw) - giving birth to a foal
Norja (Norway) - limber
Lima is also Indonesian for 5.
In Czech as well:
Peru - I wash [clothes]/I fight
Malta - mortar (for connecting bricks)
Otava (~Ottawa) - second haymaking
TORILLA TAVATAAN
Varsova (Warsaw) - giving birth to a foal
And people say German has hyperspecific words...
Thinking about it, there actually is a word like that, "kalben", giving birth to a calf. I guess the one for foals just isn't as common.
@@JamesDavy2009austronesian languages has "lima" or its derivatives as 5, like rima, limo, etc.
I'm Croatian, and I don't expect anyone to pronounce "Hrvatska" if they don't need to. Even from a native perspective, the name is a bit...weird.
Feel the same for Deutschland
I discovered that my grandfather and the Arabs in general before 1910 used to call foreign countries names different from the current names. For example, today we call Germany by the name that is used today is almaniya, but my grandfather used to call it (duitesheh:دُوِيْطِشَه), and France today is called farnsa, but the Arabs in the past were They call it (Franjieh:بلاد إفرنجه) and Spain today is called isbania, but in the past it was called (keshtalah:قشتالية)and so on, the old people still use these old names, But modern generations use modern names For countries.
Isn't this just different Arabic dialects though? (Leave the Spain example aside - that is probably from the Islamic-Ladino dialect)
@@איתןשיthat's not from ladino, it's just historic, referring to the kingdom of Castille, or Castela in Spanish, which was the biggest one of the Christians kingdoms in Iberia, and conquered most of the remannents of the Arabic speaking Al-Andalus.
The same is for France as Faranji used to refer to the Francs, specifically those in the crusades
There are a few cities that get foreign names. Praha used to be Prag in Norwegian, like it's still Prague in English. These things often just change over time. When the name is perfectly pronouncable, it feels a bit odd and archaic to use such old names.
@@Mnnvint it's the famous saying, don't fix what is broken, also it was the Czech langauge that changed, the Name was Always Praga, but in Czech they lost the G sound in most words that then was transformed into H. So Praga -> Praha
Transliteration from another alphabet necessarily takes you another step away from the endonym.
In Irish , the name changes depending on the context/ Grammer of sentence which wouldn't work in all languages
That's a very valid point in many languages. I don't know how drastically things change in Gaeilge (I've tried learning a bit but I found it's more complex than I can learn on my own), but it it's something simple like a prefix/suffix change, that could be part of a compromise: you could use the closest approximation of the endonym as rendered in your language as the base name and then adapt it to fit the grammar cases as needed.
man, slavic languages mess up all the names like that too ugg
An Fhrance, An tSvergie, An Dheutchland, An... 中h国...!?!
I forgot about declensions/mutation. Good point
Yeah, but like personal names there is a standard version that get borrowed and stays unchanged (or accepts the variations of the import language).
1:31 it is pronounced almost exactly like the English pronunciation. Your Spanish pronunciation put the stress on the e when it should be on the U
Last I looked, the acute in Spanish indicated stress.
@@JamesDavy2009 right, the stress is supposed to be on the vowel it is placed on. He moved it away from it
how is he actually so bad at pronouncing names when he’s a channel called name explain. it’s embarrassing
@@matthewluck9077I think he doesn’t look up the pronunciation of words before using them, it seems quite lazy. It’s kind of disrespectful since it seems he isn’t even making an effort to get the correct pronunciations
@@tomsmithok I agree. And if he doesn't know the pronunciation and doesn't want to look for it, then he shouldn't even try to pronounce the country in the native language
The problem with only using Endonyms is that several countries (DRC, Mali, South Africa, etc.) have multiple languages that all have loads of speakers, and it’d be difficult to choose which to use the endonym from.
The one with the most speakers
We would also have this problem in Switzerland, so the only fair option in my opinion is all names from all native languages are considered endonyms.
@@Khloya69 That isn’t always easy to do. Take South Africa. If you go by native speakers the most spoken language is Zulu, but that’s still only 25% of the population. The name is essentially the same in every language, only translated for grammar (eg Suid Afrika in Afrikaans and iNingizumu Afrika in Zulu). Having no official endonym helps not show favouritism between languages.
@@dionemoolman Yeah this is the other problem - it's sometimes blurry what is a proper name and what is a word.
It bugs me when Ivory Coast insists that its name be in French, even though it's made up from easily translated nouns.
I agree, but it caused postal problems. "Ivory" and "Coast" come out very different in various languages-- Elfenbeinküste in German, Bereg Slonovoy Kost' in Russian. Where Kost' means "bone", not " coast".
East Timor and White Russia-- i.e., Belarus-- have the same problem.
@@kenaikuskokwim9694exactly. people only complain about ivory coast, meanwhile:
belarus = white rusia
ukraine = the border
montenegro = black mountain
venezuela = little venice
etc.
It's because Ivory Coast has historically been called Ivory Coast. I still call it that. Any other name is gibberish in English. Besides some government somewhere has no right to impose speech--bad precedent.
And quite amusingly they insist on using a colonial language and name instead of anything local, opposed to their neighbours Burkina Faso.
Ivory Coast (Côte d'Ivore) is "Pobřeží slonoviny" in Czech (no idea how to explain that in English)
Just curious... does "Saksa" relate to the "Saxons", the Germanic people who settled in England?
Yes and they´re now in the East of Germany, so Finnish people call us Saksa.
It does but not (directly) to those in England but those who inhabited most of Northern Germany and traded and crusaded in the Baltics, interacting with the Finnic people. They are still called "saksit" in Finnish and the state of Saxony is "Saksi" (compared to "saksalaiset" and "Saksa" which is likely just a dialectal alteration).
@@ruedigernassauerno, the people did not move to the east. Only the title of chieftain or later king of saxons moved by heritage and marriage. The saxon people continued to settle in northern Germany, which is now called Lower Saxony.
@@ckeuer We have Lower Saxony and Saxony. Saxony is Easternmore.
@@ruedigernassauer I know. I am from Lower Saxony. I just wanted to make clear, that the saxon people did not move into todays State of Saxony.
04:53 "Bharat" sounds too similar to "Barata" that means "cockroach" in portuguese, some people, those braziliam that hate non europeam people, would love to use that name instead of "Índia".
I love how the english/german pronunciation of Peru is more accurate than the supposed peruvian pronunciation
I think we shouldn't stop using them, the act of abolishing them and using endonyms instead feels like a political move itself, trying to regulate how words should be in other languages. And I personally think it's nice to discover how your nation is called in another language, especially if it's something that differs from the endonym a lot. Plus since we live in the age where we could easily translate anything, why not include place names in that too? What actual benefit would there be if everyone called Finland as Suomi in their respective language? Should we also apply that to various regions, cities, rivers and so on?
With pronunciation issues and lack of knowledge of proper spelling, you'd end up with new exonyms shortly anyway.
Rises the question, what do we call a river if it goes to several countries?
@@Llortnerof It may end up being even more interesting exonyms.
The type which have a shared written form (quite the challange for keyboards), but various pronunciation. It would give an easy comparison of pronunciation by different native speakers.
Burma is an alternative derivative of both mranma and brahma desha. The adjective Burmese is still used. The leader of Myanmar has stated that both are correct, and Myanmar is just a recent stylistic prefence. The names derive from Sanskrit and are far, far older than English.
It's a popular idea that the older form of the country's name - Mranma - comes from Sanskrit "Brahma desha" but it's more likely not. But yes, either Burma or Myanmar can be used, it just depends on register. Myanmar - mjəmà - is more literary and "upper" then Burma - bəmà.
@@hughanquetil2567 Why is it more likely not?
@@sarban1653it just doesnt make sense.
@@rizkyadiyanto7922 Why not?
A current dispute in the US is just what to call various Native American groups. Do you use the English version of what their neighbors called them, as with Sioux. Or Dakota, which is closer to what they call themselves? Of course, neither is quite right. It gets worse in Canada, with some groups coming up with names using transliteration schemes that are unpronounceable in both English and French.
Sioux in particular originated from a slur so maybe not that one.
"Sioux" looks very much like a French word.
@@ob_dowboosh As I understand it, Sioux is a French transliteration of an Ashinabe word for their neighbors (and enemies), meaning something like “the rattlesnakes”.
There's a people called Dogrib, which is a translation of the endonym. In Russian it's called Догриб, which is a transliteration of the translation, and so wrong. Either call them Собакоребреци or Псоребреци, or say Тлѧчѫ. And never mind that Russians don't yus those letters anymore!
JJ McCullough has a good video about that one.
One big point of exonyms that you have not mentioned is that the “original” name may change overtime due to political issues. E.g. former Belgisch Congo was changed to Zaire and then some decades latter back to Congo. Egypt is the English erosion of a name originating from Ancient Greece and Roman times way back in time before Arabic speakers settled there. Sometimes a country even may have benefits from a well established exonym, e.g. Made in Germany is globally accepted as something valuable, Hergestellt in Deutschland would sound rather strange in the Non-German speaking markets.
Like the whole Kiev/Kyiv thing exists because while Ukrainian pronunciation changed over time, Russian retained the name Ukrainians used to call it back in the day.
Cambodia used to be called Kampuchea.
This is definitely the case with Korea, which derives from the ancient kingdom of Goryeo, whereas South Korea uses Hanguk referring to a slightly different set of ancient kingdoms, and North Korea uses Joseon, referring to a more recent dynasty. Which leads to the odd circumstance that Korea has *two* endonyms.
If the rule is ALWAYS endonyms, then we must spell Sumer in cuneiform and Khnum (Egypt) in Hieroglyphics, Hellas in Greek letters and Rossia in Cyrilic
It doesn't apply to different scripts.
@@sarban1653 turks dont think so
@@bsod111 Turkish uses the Latin script, just a different variation. Same script though.
*Ellada
I can see a few possibilities:
1. We rewrite exonyms to be as close to the endonym as possible.
2. We keep the status quo, but require that both endonyms and exonyms be taught in classrooms.
3. We let diplomacy do its thing, and we use either the UN or create a new treaty organization to standardize the names of countries in a legally binding resolution.
We should just use the ISO 3-letter or 2-letter codes as they are universal no matter the language.
Who is the globalised "we" that you are referring to? It's crazy that any move towards a unified globalism would marginalise, suppress, and obfuscate various ethnic characteristics as already exercised by ethnic minorities-shouldn't these individual rights be upheld instead of slating them to be paved over by the royal "we" of globalism? I'd just say leave it all alone and let people stay free to exercise their own decisions within their own particular ethnic culture: which is to say, leave everyone to continue with free speech.
@@harrisonofthenorth please refer to my 2nd proposal. Just teach children the exonyms and endonyms in their geography classes. Just print the endonym on the map next to the exonym. Not that difficult.
4. Stop trying to "fix" something that isn't a real problem and would just make things worse. You won't pronunce most endonyms correctly anyway to the point where you're effectively still using an exonym.
@@Llortnerof
I agree. Languages do "evolve". So, when a certain name is used often by the speakers, if exonym or endonym, it will be used. Pressing thing into a language is seen very poorly by me at the time.
3:32 it's curious how in some languages we have both "land" and "ia" suffix placed together in a lot of country names.
In Portuguese for example, Thailand is called Tailândia, that literally means "land of land of Thai" (yes, 2 times)
England became Inglaterra but Ireland became irlanda not irlaterra. This probaly beacause beacause english influence.
Also Scotland had it second dropped.
Don’t forget Portlandia!
"land" is not a suffix. It is the second root. And the suffix "-ia" doesn't necessary mean land. Mafia, magia, fantazia.
in indonesian:
polandia
irlandia
islandia (iceland)
skotlandia
A general solution is always bad, instead each country decides by itself
Burma is not problematic at all. It in fact derived from Burmese. A lot of Burmese prefer the name Burma as the military dictatorship changed the country’s name to Myanmar, so many political and ethnic opposition groups prefer Burma.
It does show the point of what endonym to use.
However- that problem would not apply to places such as the US or Australia. Indigenous people usually did not have a concept of the entire country- only their own land. So there is no problem using the modern official name for the entire modern political nation.
Are exonyms causing a problem? As countries change their official names, it is sensible to change the names for formal matters, but below this does it really matter? To carry it through all the way, we would have to write, say, Bhaarat as भारत. How many alphabets are we all going to have to learn?
Probably a lot as that's not how the country's name is spelled in the Gujarati alphabet or in the Punjabi alphabet (actually, Punjabi has two scripts, the Arabic-based Shahmukhi script and a Sikh-derived script, Gurmukhi) or in Bengali. And, not even all languages native to India use "Bharat": In Tamil, the country is "Intiya" (and Tamil has its own script as well). There are, after all, 22 languages recognized in India as official using 12 different scripts.
We could all switch to a phonetic script together, now that would actually make sense.
@@josephwest124 And Intiya is either the root or a cognate of "India", so you could say that the exonym is just a pronunciation adaptation for ease of use of a valid endonym.
We also have "हिंदुस्तान" (Hindustan) as an endonym for India. And भारत ("Bharat"; even though the second a in "Bharat" is heavily misleading when it comes to pronunciation, but whatever), Hindustan, and India are names commonly used by us Indians (well, at least by us North Indians).
For some countries it is an issue. I imagine that over time more countries will ask we use their endonym as the word they want to be used.
A few countries have already done this - Turkiye, Cote D’Ivoire, Timor Leste, Cabo Verde for example. It is not that hard to use these names not the English.
If India wants to be referred to as Bharat, then that is something we can get used to. Schools will start using that and in 20 years it will be common place.
To be fair this exclusive to the English language.
Because English is now the global language, we have all made English "our language", sort of. And we'd like to hear the name of our country/city pronounced our way in English.
Nobody cares about french or spanish speakers saying Pekin instead of Beijing
Even though English pronunciation of Beijing isn't accurate and Pekin is an attempt to be closer to the Chinese pronunciation. Petching would be closer.
I think most people would be incredibly confused to hear some call Beijing Peking regardless of the language.
Ew no
@@hedgehog3180 same confussion when someone says Munich instead of München
So how do you feel about "France" versus "France"? Let me IPA: "frɑːns" versus "frons"? It gets even trickier with East Asian languages that need inflection to denote meaning, a surprising amount sometimes. We're pretty keen on dropping "Peking", but how many people are too lazy to say "Beijing"? (Hint: There's no "sh" or "jh" sound in there - it's not a French word!)
But where do we draw the line? Can some words be deemed "too hard, impossible" because of the sounds they use?
What if some native speakers can't say "θ" - not a problem for Nederland or Thailand, or even Lesotho, but what about "Ethiopia" or "Athens" for that matter?
Lesotho is not pronounced with "θ", the "H" is silent.
@@JamesDavy2009 I think I already made that point. Re-read what I said.
I think the only realistic change is that if a country finds itself wanting a new name, they must go through the process of having it officially changed, like Burma > Myanmar. Then, with the new name, each language is responsible for either adopting the endonym or (in the case that it conflicts with pronunciation/spelling) come up with a suitable exonym for it. Ideally the exonym should be identifiable enough to the endonym in my opinion, so Germany/Deutschland wouldn't fit, instead turning into the perhaps unfortunately confusing "Dutchland".
Personally I disagree with Turkey changing to Türkiye in English. The umlaut Ü is not a feature of the English alphabet, so it is extremely out of place. It also doesn't feel necessary to maintain the spirit of the name. Turkiye or (perhaps easier for English speakers) Turkiya, I think would be appropriate exonyms.
What do you think about Ivory Coast officially having their English name being changed from Ivory Coast to Côte d'Ivoire?
@@sarban1653 Oh yeah that's kinda silly too. Not like it changes much either except being more difficult to understand and pronounce lol.
iy is jsut weird combo in english also hence why kiev for the city in ukraine in English
"Turkiye" is already accepted if ü is not supported by keyboards etc. But according to the ISO 3166-1, Türkiye's English name is Türkiye. With the letter "ü"
To add on that discussion: In the indigenous language of central Cameroon, Éwondo, France is called Plési (with voiceless "s"). It is not an exonym. It is the French pronunciation of "France" transliterated into to the sound inventary of Éwondo. An "f" gets replaced by a "p", an "r" by an "l", the nasalized "an" becomes plain "é" and an additional "i" has been fumbled at the word´s end.
The United Kingdom is still referred to by its pre-1801 name, Great Britain, in Swedish. Growing up I had always assumed that they were synonyms, and only later realized Swedes never bothered updating the exonym.
I think a halfway measure, whereby people used as many endonyms as possible. The ones that are reasonable within language groups. e.g. Italia, is easy for German (Italien) French (Italie) English (Italy). In Mandarin, Japan is ribenguo (land of the rising sun) and nippon/nihon mean origin of the sun. So you could argue that is the same name. If you say nihon in mandarin (it can easily be heard as nihong) it would mean "you are red" or "fat is overflowing" depending on the tone.
"fat is overflowing"
I see the issue: it would be easy to confuse it with USA.
@@rgbx6923 🤣🤣🤣 and "you are red" describes Brits in Ibiza
Thanks!
There are a few countries, such as Central African Republic, that need to be translated simply because they have very specific words in their names. But on the other hand, "Netherlands" is often translated to something like "low land" in other languages. I think there should be a mix of endonyms and exonyms, depending on the wants and needs of the people living in that place and the speakers of the various languages. Korean, for example, has no "F" sound, so Fiji becomes "Pi-Ji", and no "V", so Vietnam becomes "Beh-Teu-Nam".
Isn't Korea a perfect example of this as well, which should be called Hanggul?
@@איתןשיHangul is the name of the writing system. The actual country is called Daehan Minguk
@@KaitouKaiju LOL - a brain fart from me... Still my point stands though
Either they should be called Low Lands in English or Lower Saxony should be called Nether Saxony
@@DatAlien It's already got a second name: Holland.
Plenty of exonyms are just older variants of endonyms. Or in case of Japan its because they insisted on writing the meaning of their name using chinese characters which was then read based on a certain chinese dialect from a region that regularly interacted with Japan. Many supposed Endonyms are refering just to parts of the country or single groups of people. Or in case of Myanmar it replaced the word the people actually used with the "correct" way that was mainly used in writing.
Closer to my home some cities have english names which conserve the names from before the native low saxon was replaced by high german and I must say, Brunswick is a better name than Braunschweig.
The only cases I support the switch is when for some reason only a formal name is used (Czech Republic instead of just Czechia) or if the name is based on a slur from a neighbor. And the city of Nissa should be named using the local dialect, hearing about the Nice attack was unnecessarily funny for what happened.
try this: The name I use for a certain west Pacific geological feature is, “Beautiful Sweet Potato Island.” It is an island, obviously. It is shaped like a sweet potato. Formosa in Portuguese, Hermosa in Spanish, and Taiwan in native Siraya all translate into English as, “Beautiful.” Beautiful Sweet Potato Island is not immediately politically prejudiced. (Except for the proposed flag containing a green sweet potato outline.)
No, we shouldn't. Maybe the major ones, but I don't think a name ending in -y or -ie causes much confusion. Names also need to adapt to the launguage's pronounciation. I can't imagine saying things like Magyarország all the time
If Hungary would change to Magyarorszag you would probably shorten it to Magyar or Magyaror
@@איתןשיMageezak? Magyaria? Magyarland? Magyarzach?
its something I noticed quite young and I know the name of the 10 closest countries to my country in over 4 different languages and I never seen it as a problem, but am surprised that u only talked about name of countries and not cities, I live in belgium and there is 2 main languages and every single city in belgium has both a dutch and a french name which often have nothing in common
Similiar thing was truth with Czechia where many towns and cities had both Czech and German names. And then World Wars happen.
I find it interesting so that even though "Germany" was not a cohesive unit in the past and all of the surrounding peoples were interacting with different Germanic tribes, everyone was able to recognize the Germanic peoples of that region as a distinct enough entity that they needed to create their own word to describe those peoples as a unit.
We also similarly had/have words to collectively refer to Slavs as a whole. In Old German, they were called Wends. And in Old English, the were called Winds.
I feel like the easiest solution that could maintain cultural respectfulness while also maintaining pronounability would be to take the endonym of a country and alter it to be as close as possible to that original endonym into a new, similar exonym. Like with Peru, since it's already similar to the endonym, it could be left alone; meanwhile some words like Japan could be replaced with something like Nihone, or Germany with Dutchland. Of course this would be much easier if English used diacritics, but alas.
Okay, but I still support encouraging people in English to start using "Sakartvelo" for the country south of the Caucasus to avoid confusion with the US state of Georgia.
Fun fact: Norway has three different endonyms, all written on our passports
Norge, Noreg and the third one is which?
@@ruedigernassauer Norgá, it's in Sami. Might not be on the old red passports but the new pink ones have them.
Many exonyms result from adaptations based on phonetics. When you hear a Swahili person say Kanada or a Belarusian say Канада, it sounds very much like a Canadian saying Canada. In many languages a C is never hard like a K, so if you change the spelling you will end up with a different pronunciation in different languages.
No. If some countries ACTUALLY PREFER to be addressed internationally using one set of phonetic and morphologic unit, they can. but to enforce it across languages with no regards for their phonotactics would just be overkill. especially if some countries did not even think of this as an issue.
turkey comes to mine there the u with the dots doesn't exist in enlgish and iy isn't used in it either
It reminds me of Iran's language. Some in the west prefer to call it Farsi (the name in its language) but Iran asks for people to call it Persian because of cultural connotations of "Persian" (art, splendor, conquest, etc).
Meanwhile, Farsi doesn't mean anything, so it feels like it undersells the potency of the language.
It's not just language issues, but even accent issues.
For example the host of Name Explain has an accent where he says "TH" as an "F", and usually appends "were" to the last word of a sentence. Listen to the last 2 words in this video at 13:16 he says "Fank You-were" (instead of "Thank yoo").
So the country of (say) "Lesotho" probably would be said "Leso-fo-were", so it's not just language barriers (such as with Japanese and "L" sounds) but accent barriers too to be able to say the endonym.
Lesotho isn't even pronounced using the dental fricative, the "H" is silent as if a New Yorker is saying it.
@@JamesDavy2009 ok I gave a bad example.
My point is still that accents might deviate from a globally agreed name, even if language difficulties like Japanese and "L" were worked around.
As someone learning other languages, learning the endonyms are basically a requirement for at least halfway sounding native.
However, as someone that knows that countries are willing to completely rename areas, for good as mentioned in the video but also for ill such as China renaming what they've conquered of Tibet (already an exonym) to Xizang in an attempt to normalize their holdings, it's good to at least have a cultural and historical reference point that everyone agrees on, even if you might not use it when it can get you into hot water politically or legally when visiting.
Abandoning exonyms would create a double standard. Some are easy to pronounce like Türkiye, Bharat or Sakartvelo, but then you get to the interesting ones like "al-ʾimārāt al-3arabiyya l-muttaHida" (United Arab Emirates) where the 3 and H represent sounds not found in English (or many other languages for that matter). You could try approximating it but you would most likely mess up. I prefer foreigners saying "Hungary" rather than trying to say "Magyarország" and butchering it.
Funily enough Czech exonym for Hungary is butchering of it's native name: Maďarsko.
@@petrfedor1851 And so is the Turkish one, Macaristan.
Getting rid of exonyms should be done on a case by case basis. Changing Bombay to Mumbai in people’s minds is easier than trying to teach people how to make a new sound in an unfamiliar language. It would be one thing if we all spoke and read the same language, but we don’t.
An added complication to this is what do we do about writing systems? For languages that use the Latin alphabet, we don’t all use them the same way. Between Indian languages in the US and Polish, the letters don’t always make the same sound. So if we were to get rid of endonyms, do we transliterate them all to make them easier to pronounce, or do we all have to start learning bits of other languages writing systems? It’s kind of pointless for most people to know the Ł in Łodz makes the W sound, not an L, and that’s assuming you speak English. God help you if Mandarin is your native language.
I'm curious now, if English speakers were to use the endonyms of a country that uses a gendered language (not sure if that's the correct term) would the English speaker include the gendered article or not. For example, would we call it "La France" or just "France" with a French accent?
This is a subclass of a bigger issue with differentiating a proper name and a regular word (eg. is "South" part of the endonym of "South Africa")
And how should other languages deal with pronounciation and spelling differences? Should Czechs write United Kingdom and remember it's pronounciation or should we write it Junajted Kingdom?
Consider this:
If your native language is Japanese, how would you write the endonym "United Kingdom"? Japanese doesn't have an "ng" phoneme, and japanese characters (except for n) end in vowel sounds.
In reality, Japan calls the UK "Igirisu", from Portuguese "Inglês", and I've also seen "buritisshu" be used. If you wanted to transliterate "United Kingdom" to Japanese, it would be "Yunaitedo Kingudomu" (ignoring slight differences because I don't speak japanese well enough to do this properly. The point is it *has* to change to fit the writing system)
5:30 got to love a channel that clearly defines when facts stop and opinions start.
I do believe it is better to keep exonyms, as a South African I agree with the last point, as we do not have a single Endonym, but multiple, and it would definitely not go over well trying to decide which one to use
I'm personally of the opinion that exonyms are okay as long as they hew closely to the original endonym. It's unfair to expect any language to adopt new sounds, characters, or vowel stress patterns. At the same time, it'd be nice to recognize how the people of any nation refer to themselves.
So, I'm all for India becoming recognized as Bharat, or Finland as Suomi. But something like turning Turkey to Türkiye is just a little on the nitpicky side.
I think hink we need to distinguish between translations and completely different names.
For example, Italia, Italy, Italien, etc. are obviously all based on the same word root. The different languages only adjusted the word to their own linguistics rules.
But Germany, Allemagne, Saksa, etc. are all completely different words. And neither one of them is the country's actual name.
I do think that any country has the right to expect others to use its proper name.
But I they should not attempt to enforce any one specific form of that name; especially because this specific form might be problematic for certain languages to pronounce or to write down.
Another reason why I don't support endonyms is because right now supporters for it almost always do so for overtly nationalistic reasons, often intended to exclude some people.
You´re right. "France" for example excludes everyone non-French. Same thing for Italy, Croatia,...
@@ruedigernassauer But nationalistic always push for the ethnicity, not for citizenship. For example, Nazis excluded lots of people that were born in Germany for generations because they were different from the "true Germans"...
@@madjames1134 Apparently you took my response as serious. What´s your point? Sould we rename France, Italy and Croatia?
We used to translate personal names too. John, Johann, Juan, Jean etc. And then we stopped that. Why exactly I wonder?
It sucks when discussing history in other languages because it takes a while to realize that Christopher Colombus and Cristobel Colon are the same guy. Henry II and Henrique II (as opposed to the Henry II of England).
My english teacher ages ago taught me 'Never translate people's or location's names, that is weird as hell'. Nowerdays, they do that over all media. I was absolutely unable to read the German translation of 'A Song of Ice and Fire' because the names were all translated and came out stupidly silly.
So it's a trend. Half a generation does translate names = uses exonyms, another hals a generaation does not = using endonyms, and back and forth and on and on depending on where you are, how old you are, which whom you talk and who taught you whatever language. In the end it comes down to personal taste.
11:55 I said the same thing about time zones. It can be confusing when a streamer says they'll be online at 3PM, and you have to remember where they live, so you can calculate the time difference.
Mandatory Finn self insert: we have very distinctive names for our neighbours and historical friends/foes:
Sweden - Ruotsi
Estonia - Viro
Russia - Venäjä
Germany - Saksa
This. Who is a Russian or Swede to tell Finnish people to please use our local, native name.
Finland has very good reasons to call those countries what it calls them, reasons that go back in some cases millennia.
@@calum5975 russians and swedes just wont care at all, they dont have any inferiority complex about their country names. most of those who dont know already would react like "ah, cool, interesting, so that's how you call our country in your language" and this would be it
They are almost the same in estonian
Sweden:Rootsi
Russia:Venemaa
Germany:Saksamaa
Finland:Soome
Estonia:Eesti
For this to work, you would need to transcribe the pronunciation into every language, because otherwise you'll have to learn the pronunciation independent of the spelling.
Deutschland works in German, but not English, where it needs to be "Doitchlant' to give the closest pronunciation. Similar to Suomi to Swomi for English.
Other examples are Armenia being Hayastan in English, but Hajastan in Germanic and Slavic languages, Hajasztan in Hungarian.
So you still end up with different spellings, close spellings, but this is to achieve the closest pronunciation for each language, so you can just read it like any other word. Pronunciation will be off, but it's the best we can do.
In German it would be "Hajastan", the "ß" is now after our little spelling reform written only after long vowels and diphthongs.
@@ruedigernassauer I picked it to avoid the "st" being pronounced "scht"
@@Liggliluff "St" ist pronounced liked "sht" only at the beginning of words, behind a prefix ("stehen" and "bestehen"") or in combined words ("Handstand").
@@ruedigernassauer but it is start of a word: Stan, which would be like Stad right? Hajan-Stan. I understand that "Stan" isn't a German word, but the point of this was to treat it as a German word.
@@Liggliluff "-stan" has no meaning in German than that as a suffix of an oriental country like Pakistan, Afghanistan etc. The pronunciation is thus "staan", not "shtaan". "Stadt" (=town) on the other side can stand alone, so it´s always pronounced "sht...", also in compounds like "Friedrichstadt".
6:55 You're _really_ underselling how difficult Lietuva would be for a Japanese person to pronounce.
Li -> there's no L -> Ri
Tu -> while the T sound exists, but it can not be followed by a U, and it must become a CH
-> also, the u isn't even exactly the same sound as the one we all use
Va -> there's no V -> Ba
Lietuva -> Riechuba
(Though modern Japanese is definitely opening up to foreign sounds, it is a _slow_ process.)
I would have thought it would be transliterated as, 「リーツバ」
@@JamesDavy2009 Realistically, it'd be something like that.
But this video's prompt was about taking the words _exactly_ so we have to get as close as possible
Turkey is really tired of being seen as a Thanksgiving bird
Most of the time it's not an issue, much less a problem. In cases like Turkiye or India/Bharat, if they ask, sure why not? But if the locals don't complain, there's not much of a call to action. One problem though... how "authentic" are we supposed to get? Chinese for China is "Zhōngguó". Just between you and me, I have trouble with tonal values, as well as the 'r' in France. Should I fake a French accent when referring to the country?
I think there are some valid arguments for using endonyms, but overall I think exonyms will, in some form or another, be around indefinitely. I definitely understand how some countries don't like their exonyms, and that's perfectly valid, but at the same time it's a question of practicality and implementation.
Specifically for France, whose population seems to abhor every English speaker's pronunciation of their country's name that isn't spoken in a perfect French accent, getting every English speaker to speak French isn't a realistic goal, but they would similarly struggle with saying "The United Kingdom" in an English accent or "Australia" in an Australian accent. Same as New Zealanders pronouncing "Magyarország" would have as hard a time as Hungarians pronouncing either "Aotearoa" or "New Zealand."
Put simply, expecting every person in the world to pronounce every sound from every language just to properly learn a country's name is a very tall order and not likely to happen.
Fun Fact: "Deutsche" (Germans) comes from "Teutsche" comming from Teutons, it was a name of another German tribe, meaning "people", mockingly given by the Italians and we just ran with it.
Meanwhile neighboring Slavs: Wtf is this gibberish? They can't speak (our language), let's call them mutes.
finnish Saksa comes from the Saxon tribes, french Allemande from the Alamans tribe, Germany from the Germanian tribe family......
And slavic words for Germany means "mute land".
The Name comes from the celtic language "teutá", then it was adapted by the romans "Teutonus" and it developed into "Deutsch" over time.
Man I love this dude . Taught me more than those 13 years of school did .
I'm going to continue to refer to Burma as Burma, because screw military juntas.
👍
The endonym of country with samurai and anime is properly written 日本, which obviously doesn't contain English letters. It's unreasonable to expect monolingual English speakers (let alone monolingual Arabic speakers) to be able to pronounce this. This is why I believe that exonyms are fine.
Language isn’t about what we “should” do. That’s prescriptivism.
I strongly dislike prescriptivism, but sometimes it is useful to work out certain common rules to adhere to.
Like stop using certain slurs and such.
Gather, discuss, bring arguments, and maybe come to some agreement.
It's not like Supreme Commitee had decided that words Korea and China is now outlawed, and the only True and Correct Way to reference respective countries is Hanguk and Zhonghua from now on.
But if we agree that it is an issue, and raise awareness, within decades we might shift to new norms.
After all, descriptivism and prescriptivism are linguistic terms. And the way we are addressing someone, what is respectful and disrespectful, is more of a political question.
It's not like prescriptivist are holding you back from using offensive words and slurs all of the time.
And it is descriptivist who would tell you what is considered disrespectful
@@laierr Of course I agree that slurs and such are things that can and should be eliminated, and that that process of elimination is not prescriptivism, but this video and many other discussions I think are. Your example of Korea and China works in favor of this because (to my knowledge) there is no one even proposing that either are offensive there. I’ve met many of both country and have never picked up any feeling of resentment for calling them their English names in English. The same goes for many exo-ethnonyms that micromanaging Anglos have almost universally agreed are passé like Indian, Gypsy, and Eskimo.
Yes these changes (if they were to ever happen which I highly doubt) would be political, but their genesis is linguistic (or at least that bureaucrats manipulate linguistics for their own ends). After all they are still words that are the result of evolution and not decided by a committee if a commoner is using them as much as if a politician is using them. I will say though that if these changes catch on, then the prescriptivists effectively hack the natural development of language. Many modern features of English are purely the result of uptight grammarians furiously “correcting” spelling and syntax, like many of the words with useless silent letters and the rule that adverbs must only come after the verb it’s modifying. But if I were around in the 1600s, I would be poo-pooing the pedants all day.
I, having traveled all over the world and tried to learn the sentiments of non-Anglo peoples, especially from the global south, choose to reject many of the “inoffensive” ethnonyms (which ironically are often the actual offensive ones). Funny you mention politics, because these manufactured changes are mostly political, and not in any altruistic way. Like Siam being renamed Thailand, a move that was meant only to distance a new regime from the previous, and which most people in the country at the time thought was stupid; Burma, which IS perfectly acceptable and makes much more sense in English than Myanmar which most Anglos can’t even pronounce, and laughably IS STILL USED IN THE NATIVE LANGUAGE, BURMESE; and most ridiculous, Türkiye, which only the most insane, frothing at the mouth nationalists and Erdogan cronies want.
I think sometimes people are too prescriptive in their descriptivism. It’s *true* that language is determined by its use. But, this doesn’t obligate us to oppose attempts to encourage one use over another.
For example, because the word “literally” is now often used as an intensifier (in a way fitting a pattern that has happened with a number of other words before, e.g. “very”), and that is therefore one of the current meanings of the word,
that *doesn’t* mean that I have to *like* it.
And, indeed I don’t.
And so, while I don’t call such usage “incorrect” (because that doesn’t make sense) I do give people a hard time about it when they use the word “literally” in a way I dislike.
Descriptivism is a true description of how-language-works, but that doesn’t mean we should prescribe indifference towards changes to language use.
@@drdca8263 I agree mostly. I literally pull all of my hair out when people overuse the word literally. But the point of this video is very much textbook prescriptivism. The same people who espouse descriptivism are blind to the obvious prescriptive premise to this kind of discussion that is pseudo-altruistic (pseudo because next to no one actually wants these changes and the ones who do you will quickly find view language as handed down by decree).
What will you call Switzerland if you ditch exonyms? I have noticed that the names for most Latin American countries are the same in English as in Spanish, but with slight pronunciation differences. I guess this is because they are fairly new.
Exonyms are a *compliment*! Every two-bit village is called by its native name as no one ever bothered to come up with an alternative.
Whereas *important* places need a convenient name in every language.
This is an incredibly uninformed take. Places with exonyms are not always neutral or positive in vibe. Just look at Japan's name history: it's original name that was given by China was more or less directly insulting the inhabitants. In a world filled with bloody history, a lot of people named places in various ways that designated them as "the enemy" or used some derogatory word used to belittle them, or have an offensive origin through ignorance
Very few exonyms are insulting, and those that are are often changed without issue-- Samoyed to Nenets, Eskimo to Inuit. The Slavic name for Germans is an insult, but the Germans don't deign to care. "Deutsch" itself is awfully close to "deutlich", or clear. So they insult everybody!
4:48 I'm pretty sure that country only wanted to change the English exonym to try to avoid the constant jokes; the Turkish name is not used in non-English, non-Turkic languages. The Netherlands would be a bit closer to the fact, but what they've done is to ask to change the exonyms from the Holland-based to the Netherlands-based (i.e. to use however "nether lands" is said in the local language instead of variations of "Holland"; since they cannot force the issue, many speakers have not adopted the new exonyms, and Japan as a country hasn't bothered to change it).
8:32 one could argue that that's what happens with the capital of the People's Republic of China: the traditional English word "Peking" is just an slight adaptation (tone deletion) of one of the valid endonyms, and if we go for the most common endonym (once tones have been removed), it would be either "Pechin" or "Peching"; the currently favoured exonym "Beijing" is just the adaptation (tones-yadda-yadda) of the Mandarin endonym, which is the most unique one (as far as I know, the most evolved and the farthest from the original pronunciation). If we went with the traditional rules used in China before all the cleansing attempts, the correct exonym should be literally "North Capital", as they accepted any local pronunciation of 北京.
Peching and Beijing are different romanizations of the same sound. One interesting phenomenon is that Taiwan actually officially switched to using pinyin for placenames, but big cities like Taipei and Kaohsiung keep their old romanizations (instead of Taibei and Gaoxiong in pinyin), and I'm guessing using the pinyin version would be seen as being pro China taking Taiwan...
@@maxxiong I went to check wikipedia's pinyin article to see how could that be possible, and once read, let me get this straight: the imposition of "Beijing" pronounced as is is, in fact, forcing us to call the city by the wrong name just because in their standarization they gave different values to stablished letters, and forcing us to match the writing makes us mismatch the sounds?
I'll keep using "Peking", thanks, which is still an endonym (albeit slightly mispronounced due to my language using tones for expressivity instead of word differentiation).
@@jorgelotr3752 "Peking" is not even mandarin. "King" is not a valid sound in mandarin.
This comes down to how people perceive sounds. Mandarin does not distinguish between b and unaspirated p. English does not distinguish between unaspirated and aspirated p. The normal aspiration rules for English would make the p in "peking" aspirated. It sounds fine to an English ear but not a Chinese ear.
By your logic, names in other latin alphabet languages (especially something like Polish) should be respelt to fit English rules and no one does that.
@@maxxiong I said "an" endonym, not "the" endonym. That word (at least in the intermediate language English "borrowed" it from, with the "e" being read like an "eh" or an "ay") is very close to the reading of the characters in the modern languages of Cantonese (the "e" in this case is way more open), Hakka (doubling the k) and Eastern Min (the "e" more open, but less than in Cantonese), and it's technically quite period-correct for the time it entered European languages (17th century).
Were I to use the most common appelation (the Mandarin name), I would use something closer to the real pronunciation (Pei CHING, with a brief space inbetween) instead of the enforced English pronunciation (quite weird that a language for which the relationship between writing and reading is but an educated guess gets so bent in reading the word wrong to match the expected result).
My personal take on this is to use exonyms but still try to use endonyms whenever I can.
As German wouldn’t judge people for not knowing the endonym for our country. But it’s always nice to hear people making the effort, atleast trying to say it correctly. I.g. I appreciate people trying to speak another language for better communication. So out of respect I try to remember endonyms whenever I can. And as a history and linguistics enthusiast I feel this is a win win. But that’s my take. You do you
The issue is also that Germany is such a historically relevant place that it makes entire sense for different people to call it different things, and who is modern Germany as a country to tell say, the English that "uhhm actually, we'd like to be called Deutschland now, even in English".
Firstly, Deutsch literally means something like "the people", which as you imagine is kinda meaningless for non Germans. Secondly, English already uses that word for the Dutch for our own historic reasons that matter to us.
Thirdly, "Germany" is a very old name for the country which arguably is just as valid as Deutschland and definitely more culturally and historically important for English speakers than "Deutschland" is. No one is getting confused over this either.
It just feels very very condescending and rude to believe your endonym is any more valid than another people's exonym in general, right? German history has impacted more people than just Germans.
This applies for like any exonym, Germany is just a fairly good example as it has so many exonyms
@@calum5975 you do you. I said I would never judge. Greetings from alemaña
One problem with trying to use endonyms is that modern countries do not always fit neatly into older geographical concepts. Australia has multiple indigenous languages, but I doubt there is one that has a word that matches with the concept of the current nation. Similarly native American tribes will not have had a name specifically for Canada, the United States or nay other modern country. (There is also the question of whether a city should have the same name as the native land on which it was built, especially when it expands and encroaches onto other named areas.)
Regarding other countries insisting on using their preferred endonym, we have adapted to Myanmar and Sri Lanka (though our accents may butcher those names), but for Turkey to insist that we start using diacritics, which are virtually unknown in English may be going a step to far. I don't even know how to type these letters.
Los humanos siempre pronuncian las cosas como les suenan, si de desgarran las vestiduras por eso, aunque se establezcan los endónimos se van a acaban modificando.........
It's true that exonyms can bring you to political water and what not, like how the Sanskrit "cina" became one of the roots for China, to refer to the country Zhongguo, which ended up transliterated by the Chinese as 支那(Zhina). It became a neutral term to refer to mainland China, originally in ancient Indian and Chinese Buddhist texts, but during and after the Second Sino-Japanese war, the term 支那(pronounced "shina" by the Japanese) became derogatory. In modern times, 支那 was used by Hong Kong and Taiwanese independence activists as a slur against mainland China.
But I do agree with the existence of exonyms because that's how people become used to calling countries. Getting rid of exonyms is like forcing the USA to get rid of the imperial units in favor of the metric ones, like kilometers instead of miles, centimeters instead of inches, meters instead of feet, etc. If that were the case, they would have to get rid of everything like changing the speed limits and everything, and replacing them is going to take a very long time, and Americans would have to throw the imperial system out of the window, and learn the metric ones, which can be a headache for them. Dad also mentioned about how the imperial system has its own benefits like how the units are very easy to divide, like how a foot is exactly 12 inches, and what not. Exonyms should be allowed, as long as it's not made to be used as a derogatory slur to other countries, like calling it a "dog water country".
We should start using endonyms. The Soviet Union did so too and it worked. Don't know why people make an issue out of it and say "No, this is way too confusing!" when we l'Italy can become polyglots. A few words won't hurt you. Their arguments also doesn't make any sense. Just because exonyms develop doesn't mean we should use them and no, they aren't really a solution to foreign languages, there's no explanation given by those who say so why this is the case
as an english native who is interested in other languages I find the idea of modifying a languages proper names just for the sake of pronunciation ease to be a lazy and disrespectful method of engaging with another language. Its not hard to learn an accent, figure out how to make non-native sounds from other languages, and generally be educated on how to pronounce most unfamiliar words. I'm fine with transliteration to make writing systems compatible, but effort should be made to come as close to the original sounding endonym as humanly possible. Using Rossiya in English writing and speaking to refer to Россия. is totally acceptable. But calling Deutschland Germany or Nihon Japan makes absolutely no sense to me.
Because English is the world's global language, countries care way more about what we call their country than what the country's name is in Albanian. That's why we have Ivory Coast, Turkey and the Czech Republic all trying to get their name in English changed. Or the Ukrainians caring that we call it Ukraine and not 'the Ukraine' or spelling their capital Kiev as Kyiv.
Imagine getting cancelled for deadnaming a country
You don't tell me how to speak my language, I won't tell you how to speak yours.
The thing is - exonyms make sense for the people saying them. English speakers have historic reasons for calling Germany "Germany", reasons that arguably are as valid as calling Germany "Deutschland". I dont think any country has the right to enforce its name on speakers of a foreign language.
So what, in Scottish Gaelic they call England something like "Saxonland", that's a meaningful and historic name for them. It would be pathetic if England demanded Scottish Gaelic speakers started to call it England.
Unless the name they're using is derogatory, and i mean in the sense its like actively insulting, not something like polish for Germany meaning "mute ones" because German is unintelligible for Poles, you frankly have no right to ask to be called something. Its not a personal name, its a country name, and countries matter to people outside of that country - not just those within it.
The short answer is: yes, absolutely.
The long answer is: it's very complicated.
the main issue i see is: when places have multiple endonyms (because of multiple languages), which one do we use?
also, some languages have sounds that other languages don't have. spain has ñ in its endonym. that sound (not 'ny', but [ɲ]) doesn't exist in english, for example.
It does exist, when you pronounce lasagna you use it in the *gn* .
@@LuchoCastle_11 lasagna is an italian word. unless the word is pronounced 'properly' (for lack of a better word) it will probably sound more like 'lazaniya'
Even within a single language it’s possible to have more than one endonym for a country, if the national language has more than one written standard, and choosing to use one over the other internationally can be a really charged issue, far more than letting other languages use their own version of the name.
@@cfgp English _can_ support an "ny" sound, like in the word "new".
What? You don't hear a y-sound in that word? Oh ya, it was lost at some point in various accents. (Or maybe you _did_ hear the "y" sound, in which case you have an accent that doesn't do it in that word.)
@@ragnkja also the different “endonym” based on the “official” or “common” way of calling - Japan in Japanese can be both “Nihonn” (common pronunciation in everyday usage) and “Nipponn” (official pronunciation, as designated by the Ministry of Education, Culture, and Science; or in full, Nippon Koku--Nippon country)
i'm surprised he didn't even mention Crna Gora (Montenegro). he didn't even try to pronounce Hrvatska either
Montenegro is just the latin / italian translation of Crna Gora. Black mountain. So translating the endonym into a 3rd language, Why not a random other, like montaigne noir, or Schwarzberg... this can be endless.
@@rumpelstilzz But that is exactly what the White Russian dictator did: he demanded to call White Russia as "Belarus" wich is just White Russia in White Russian (bela = бела = white and rus = русь = guess what)
Exonyms can be more enduring than endonyms as Country X may persist in using an exonym for Country Y while the Country Y changes its name several times. Kountry Y, Kountri Y, Kuntri Y, Kuuntri Y, and finally glottal stop Y.
Or Asia to Turkey to Turkiye.. and several distinct city states in Asia had their own names for the peninsula.
No, it´s Türkiye. "U" is another letter.
@@ruedigernassauer you bring up another point, that many endonyms are difficult to pronounce in other languages and may be difficult or impossible to spell in foreign alphabets. Add that to the frequent changing of names. Also since even countries that share the same or similar alphabets often pronounce the letters or groups of letters differently similar spellings can yield diverse pronunciations and vice versa.
Let's be honest, Türkîyé (or however tf it's spelt) still hasn't caught on
Anything that's difficult to pronounce will be slow. I still say Ivory Coast and East Timor because I've zero clue how to pronounce Côte d'Ivoire or Timor-Leste.
It's spelled like in German Türkei. T, the I from girl, rk, I.
@@saisamsuri Portuguese has no recognized standard for pronunciation. Timor may be pronounced like Timor or like Timur, and Leste like Lesht, Leshte (schwa), Leshti or even Leshtchi. In Germany we say Osttimor (=East Timor). French pronunciation has a standard.
hopefully, it never does
@casuallystalled it's interesting that czechs themselves call their country Czesko or Czeska republika, so Czechia is still an exonym
There's another, legal, reason to maintain endonyms. In many cases the formal recognition of one country by another is a matter of law, sometimes a treaty agreement. That means that the two countries may have formally agreed as binding international law to use designated endonyms and exonyms between themselves. A great deal of treaty law around customs and immigration simply assumes this to be the case and would need to be changed, which requires the participation of all nations and many treaty organizations.
Where do you come from? Where is your accent from? It seems that you sometimes attach an "eh" at the end of some words, e. g. language-eh, has-eh, Deutschland-eh, them-eh, people-eh, accord-eh, world-eh, too-eh
I think that reflects his somewhat affected (and irritating) intonational practice with falling nuclear tones.
I think we should arrive to a compromise. Every language should use an exonym that resembles as closely as possible the endonym of a country while still being relatively easy to say and respecting the rules of the language. For English Perú would be called Peru as it’s currently called, Argentina would keep is endonym, and 日本 would be called Nihon instead of Japan.
I think keeping exonyms makes most sense because even if we did use endonyms we would likely still drift from the original after a significant period of time. That said, a nation electing to changing their name for diplomatic purposes and being adopted by the wider world makes sense like the Myanmar example, or how Thailand was once called Siam
Make that "after a few weeks". If they can even pronunce the endonym correctly to begin with. I already cringed at the Deushland in this video.
@7:05 It’s ri-to-a-ni-a which is slightly closer to Lithuania when said properly. The Japanese r lies between the English r/l which is why it’s treated that way. The bigger issue with that country’s English name is the lack of “th” in Japanese. If going with the country’s language the v would be the biggest challenge in Japanese
The "th" sound would be transliterated as "s" or "z" depending on presence of voice. What name did they give to Mothra? "V" in Japanese is usually transliterated as "b" e.g. "Betonamu" for Vietnam.
@@JamesDavy2009 モスラ isn’t the best example. Sure, based on the English “moth” rather than the Japanese 蛾/が but given Godzilla is Gojira in Japanese, it’s more about they were making up names that sound “exotic” but are easy to say in Japanese. Going back to countries where names already exist and they’re being adapted, エチオピア/echiopia for Ethiopia shows chi being used in place of th, レソト/resoto for Lesotho shows both r/l and th omission like in Lithuania. And just forget anywhere “South” is in the name as Japanese is just gonna go, I got this, 南スーダン (literally south in Japanese then suudan for South Sudan). That is, the th-> su is when there is no vowel following the th while if a vowel follows then it’s generally たちつてと ta/chi/tsu/te/to
Also, I’m aware of how V is handled, it’s just….