cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/47020617

By Beetlemoses

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[–] 20 points 5 months ago (5 children)

Well it wasn’t done by the Turks. Because they are pretty adamant that you spell it as Türkiye even in English.

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  • [–] 5 points 5 months ago (3 children)

    I feel like translating country names is a bit icky, like translating somebody's name to a local language, feels like cultural erasure... But it seems like a necessity when certain names can't be written in other alphabets or even pronounced in certain languages.

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  • [–] 11 points 5 months ago

    If you look at e.g. Germany, it's Deutschland in German, but others might call it Allemagne, Tyskland, Germania, Niemcy, Saska, ...

    I very much don't want to police what others would like to be called, but feel like having your own local name for a country is mostly normal and fine.

    I might also not be the biggest fan of the concept of countries, but that's neither here nor there.

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  • [–] 5 points 5 months ago*

    In this case replacing ü with u is easy, even if the sound isn't similar it looks similar enough.

    Deutschland vs Germany vs Alemania tho, unforgiveable. Yeah it's pronounced Doichland (kinda, forgive me Germans) but Germany or Alemania are neither similar or sound similar.

    España VS Spain is kinda similar, but low key hate that we need to go to the fucking S in drop downs when our country code is ES... Even when the drop down has España, it's always below Sri Lanka.

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  • [–] 3 points 5 months ago

    I think you can see this in several ways: The way I see it, having local names for a country should typically be seen in a positive light, because those local names typically come from having a very long history of interacting. Basically, if your language has a dedicated name for some country, it's likely because people from your countries were interacting way back when travelling across Europe could take months. Those long distances, coupled with language barriers and such, led people to translate names.

    One good example I can think of is that the Norwegian name for Belarus is "Hviterussland" (literally "White russia", which is a direct translation of "Belarus" from Belarusian). That name has been documented to have something like a 1000 year long history in the nordics, from when the vikings were travelling east. A couple years ago, the official name was changed to "Belarus". Honestly, I think it's sad that a a name that in a sense serves as a time-witness to the fact that we've interacted with these people for 1000+ years can be removed with the stroke of a pen because some people don't know their history and didn't like the name they've had in Nordic languages for 1000 years.

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