To think that having a British translation of a foreign country or city name is nonsence?

[SlightlyJaded]

The 'Pav-a-lova' thread got me twitching about this again. It really annoys me because I don't understand why we do it, but am happy to be put right by a know all wiser person than me.

So why do we feel the need to have a British translation for the name of a foreign country or city? What's would have been wrong with calling Spain Espana or Munich Munchen? To me its an utter nonsense, you are not translating from an existing known word in one language to an existing known word in another language - someone has gone to the trouble of making up a completely new and meaningless word loosely based on a word that cannot be translated as it is a naming noun.

Equally mad in reverse - other countries inventing 'names' for the United Kingdom.

do you mean english?

Yes of course I do .

I've thought this before! But when I mentioned it to DH he thought I was mad. I thought that just made me even more right about it being wierd, because he couldn't give me an answer.

I'm so glad I'm not the only one that thinks like this.

I'm guessing you are english and haven't visited Wales? Even english speaking welsh people struggle with the welsh place names.

I read it back and knew something was wrong but i waas so busy struggling to articulate why i felt it was nonsense that in fact I have now invented a language called British and spelled nonsense incorretly in the thread title

< hangs head in shame and goes to bed>

Still curious about it though

Scallops. I know we struggle with your spelling but what I am suggesting is that we should have phonetic spellings of foreign places as our 'official' translations IYSWIM

Oh I thought you meant how the Englsih gave other names to cities in countries - for example Peking when it isn't its Beijing, or Bombay when it is Mumbi

Because thats how language works? Every other language and country also does this you know.

well... to a point I see what you are getting at, same with names of royalty through the ages, we tend to anglicize them - but how is your suggestion to use the local version going to work in practice though?

What do we do about transcribing from another alphabet when we have no equivalent sound (Arabic perhaps or a language like Korean, not that I know what sounds Korean has), so we'd have to transcribe those sounds somehow and they would only ever be an approximation IYSWIM. We'd be back where we started.

How about languages which use the Latin alphabet but some extra letters we don't have - the o with a slash diagonally through it and so on? It would get fiddly if we were always having to type everything with special key functions and so on - or we'd need new keyboards.

Well a lot of the re-naming happened when we were an Empire and felt it behoved us to lord it over the rest of the world. Some places are making efforts to reclaim their names - see Mumbai.

For the rest I guess there is too much water under the bridge to bother changing. I mean, it's not as if people don't understand when we talk about Spain, Munich etc. Also we are not the only country who does this.

That too Ivy!

I was saying this only yesterday. I wonder when it first started. And how. Did they just mishear or anglasize it. I meant Florence and Firenze are very different. Some are more like translations like inglaterra or pay del gals.

I hope someone knows.

Phonetic spelling will always be a pipe dream, owing to phonetics being dependent on the individual speaker.

Even with phoneme-based spelling there would be a problem, though. Would we impose this outside our borders and insist the capital of France became "Paree"? Presumably, we change UK capital to "Lundun" first to encourage.

but wouldn't we just make fools of ourselves trying to pronounce all these foreign names? I mean come on now, we're not that good at this kind of thing.

I remember being lost in Italy somewhere as a student and asking for the Piazza Garibaldi because once I got there, I knew how to get back to where I was staying. So I stopped this guy and asked him in Italian where the la piazza Garibaldi was. Did he understand me using the Italian place name? Did he heck? I had to write it down, I kid you not. So he reads it out with this tremendous "ohhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh and then he rolls each R about a thousand times and stretches the vowels out like elastic bands". Piiiiiiiiaaaaaazzaaaaaaaaaaaa GaaaaRRRRRRiiiiibaaaaaaldiiiiiiiiiii. Which is what I thought I had said but apparently not.

Even if we use the local name, I bet most of the time they wouldn't understand what we were saying and think we are using some odd English version anyway

The portuguise don't have a "K" or is it a "c" they don't have

So Colchester or Kidderminster would be difficult, well not really you would say Ciddiminster and Kolchester

I wouldn't like to be in charge of making all the changes if you were successful pushing this one through SJ. Imagine it.

Who would get to name the Channel I wonder?

soft sounding language Portugese. I have no idea but presumably the K they don't have if one of them.

Londres? Edimbourg?

And what would we do about building Jerusalem in England's green and pleasant land?

Don't think I'll be campaigning ZZZ - I think this one is a done deal but I don't understand why.

It seems almost rude to have decided Roma should be called Rome. What's wrong with Roma? We can say it just as easily, it sounds better and more importantly, it's the correct name for the city

but what about the ones we can't say or spell so easily? What about Nord-Trøndelag or الإسكندريّة

Not so easy now is it?

ok that didn't work, it was the arabic script for al-ʼIskandariyyaḧ, which is Alexandria by the way.

oh ffs. وادي الحجرة try that one.

I give up!