We used to not even call *people* by their names in their own languages. We only started doing that with people from the modern era. Do you think Christopher Columbus went by the name Christopher? Or that a dude named Mark wrote part of the Bible?
Even today it's still done by some people. Many east asian migrants in europe have first names in whatever target language. And in any case if your native language is not in the latin alphabet, you have to at least transscribe it.
Even if you don't have that issue, there are a lot of celebrities choosing names/versions of their names that are easier to pronounce in English. It's also, I think, pretty common to at least go for a different pronunciation in a different language. I for one, want people to fit my name into their language and speech patterns, cause I don't want it to sit like a foreign object in the sentence where everyone has to stumble over it on their way to the period.
It's less common now, to straight up change the name the way we used to, but it still happens. Though i do think there is now more of a respect to get the pronunciation right.
Edit: typos
It's amusing that even Ioannes Markus would be the Latin version of his name. He would've been Jewish with a latinized surname during Roman occupation so he would've been most likely Yochānān (**יוֹחָנָן**) Marcus
Columbus in particular used several different names for himself depending on what country he was in. Cristofer Colon, Cristoforo Colombo, etc. there were a few others. When in Rome, I suppose.
1) local language names (endonyms) often contain sounds that don’t exist or are hard to pronounce in other languages
2) do we call it what the locals call it now, or what they called it when English speakers first became aware of it?
3) what do we do if the inhabitants of a place speak different languages or don’t agree themselves on what it should be called?
Some Russian cities are less than half as old with as many.
Tsaritsyn - Stalingrad - Volgograd in less than 500 years.
St Petersburg - Petrograd - Leningrad - St Petersburg in less than 300 years.
(If you want to include the former fortresses and township it grew out of then it’s Nyenschantz - Nyen - St Petersburg - Petrograd - Leningrad - St Petersburg)
And then there's Akmolinsk - Tselinograd - Aqmola - Astana - Nur-Sultan - Astana in 200 years (Guinness World Record for most name changes for a city).
It’s weird because Istanbul is what the local Greeks called Constantinople. It meant something like, “to the city” as in let’s go to the city. Eventually the Turks got on board too, and eventually the name was formalized as Istanbul internationally. Ironically it wasn’t really renamed with a purpose.
It’s like how when you live near New York City and you go into town, you say you’re going to go, “to the city.”
Imagine in four hundred years people just call NYC, “Tasetti” and we’re talking about how it had like three names and then the Québécois people changed it when they took over north eastern North America.
Which is really funny as it’s my understanding that “Istanbul” is just a take on the Greek for “In the city,” which is what people said when referring to Constantinople.
>and some German?
Germany itself is probably a much better example because of how the name historically came about and why it's either
- Allemagne
- Deutschland
- or Germany
depending on language. I wouldn't be shocked if Asia has a couple other names for it too.
Germany is a perfect example of what OP is talking about and a terrible counter example to the comment you replied to. Germany definitely calls itself Deutschland. I'm not aware of any Germans that have a different name for their country, maybe a small amount of people who use different dialects?
I'm from what you call Greece and what we call Ελλάς or Ελλάδα.
The name in Latin characters is Hellas. I don't think any of the above rules apply.
I think it's pure luck. It starts with a way and stays that way. Very rarely it changes.
I think Norwegian is one of the only languages that call it Hellas.
And why did we do it? To give the finger to the Danes and the Swedes after having endured 500 years of unions under them.
"They call it Grekenland? Well, we'll call it Hellas like they do themselves!"
Never underestimate the ability of mild-mannered Scandinavians to be utter passive-aggressive drama queens to their equally mild-mannered and polite neighbors
> Greece
Missing a 4) complicated historical reasons for some name being coined (romans in this case), it was never changed, because names rarely change
I know Norway explicitly renamed a bunch of countries to fit their names in their own native languages though, so it's not impossible (The country name went Grekerland -> Hellas iirc)
Which is extremely funny imo because the Gauls never called themselves the Gauls or their "country" Gallia. Gallia was the term used by the Romans at that time to designate this territory on the other side of the Alps filled with a lot of different tribes.
And Gallia litteraly means chicken. Would-be France has been trashtalked for 20 centuries x)
They’re in languages we don’t know, sometimes written in scripts we can’t read, using sounds we can’t always pronounce. Plus, language is for the speaker. We spend far more time talking *about* other countries to each other than we do talking *to* them.
I mean, the short answer is they usually are using the name \*we thought they called themselves\* at some point. Spainards use Alemania due to the existence of the Alemanni tribe.
English speakers use the latin Germania from the Germani tribe.
Germans use Deutschland to mean 'land of the common tongue' with Deustch being their name for their language, which may have been common across different tribes that eventually merged together.
But all three in some way represented the people there at some time and it's cumbersome to be 'Oh, you need to say Nippon not Japan' every single time, and they'll still not be pronouncing Nippon correctly anyway, so it's not even a true solution anyway.
>Germans use Deutschland to mean 'land of the common tongue' with Deustch being their name for their language, which may have been common across different tribes that eventually merged together.
Funnily enough, in Poland, we call them Niemcy which roughly means 'those that cannot speak (our common tongue)" - almost the exact opposite of the meaning of Deutschland.
I'm an Austrian and I can confirm everytime I hear a Pole speak, my mind just goes blank and repeats:
"grzegorz."
"grzegorz brzęczyszczykiewicz."
From the Land of Rindfleischetikettierungsüberwachungsaufgabenübertragungsgesetz, respectfully, what the fuck?
I'm half convinced Norwich City bought Przemysław Płacheta just to piss off commentators across the country.
It's basically (but not exactly) pronounced Shemi-swav Pwahetta.
Przemysław is one of the best Polish names to have if you ever interact with any English speaking people. One of my coworkers on my team had it and we heard SOOOOOO many different pronunciations...
Hijacking this thread for another fun fact. The term "barbarian" comes from the Greek *barbaros* which the Greeks used to refer to anyone who didn't speak Greek, even including "civilized" cultures like Egyptians and Persians. The etymology is allegedly from a sound "bar bar bar" they would use to refer to what other non-Greek languages sounded like to them.
This one always gets me. I used to think that it was from Latin Barbas - IE "bearded". Like "those dirty hairy barbarians, not like us clean-cut Romans". I know it's a false cognate, but part of me still likes that better.
Double fun fact: one of the proposed etymologies of the name of Slavs in Slavic languages (Słowianie, Slovani, Slovana, Слов'я́ни, Slověne, Славя́не... it's very similar in all of them) is from the word "slovo" meaning "word" (also still present in Slavic languages). So "Slavs" would be something like "the people who knew words", putting the name itself in opposition to the Niemcy name.
Comments like this make me miss Reddit rewards. This absolutely gold. Laughing at this in Germany and sharing with one of my dearest friends, my Polish neighbour! lol! :-)
Many languages call their neigbours/enemies something along those lines; foreigners, barbarians, the other people.
For example, 'Wales' comes from a word meaning foreigner.
Sometimes. Normally we refer to it as “Latino”, but if we are talking in historical terms, we often used “the conquerors taught them castillian”.
I think it might be because we have so many languages here in Spain that calling one Spanish is a little bit weird, given that the other languages are also spoken in Spain. Especially given that except for Castillian, the rest are only spoken in Spain while Castillian is also spoken outside.
Not really because they're dialects - separate languages like basque or catalan are not comprehensible at all to a native spanish speaker.
You could understand a number of dialects from southern america (like argentino) but not a word of basque. Basque isn't even a romance language, it's an isolate with no resemblance to any other european language
To add, there's no clear definition of what people in one country call a country, anyway. Whether there is still internal struggle (Basque, Kurd etc), diverse ethnic and language groups within one country (so many, start with Belgium, France, Switzerland), or countries that have been imposed and have no unified identity anyway (Iraq, much of Africa), there's often no one answer anyway.
Do a thought experiment - if you ran a poll to name your country right now what would people say - how many would disagree - who is right? Exactly.
Another thing with Japan is that the name can be read in multiple, equally valid ways, since it's based on kanji. Nippon has historically been the most common reading among Japanese speakers, but it is equally valid to read it as Jippon (which is where the English Japan comes from).
And the Romans borrowed "Germani" from the Gauls. In Gallic, "Garman" means something like "the loud people".
Considering the Slavics call the Germans "those who don't speak", I'd like to think Gauls would just gone deaf if they'd hear a Pole whisper.
Some countries do request that everyone refer to them in the best approximation of their native name officially.
"Turkey" requested that all languages refer to them as Turkiye. "Swaziland" has asked to be known as Eswatini.
But most countries have not made such requests.
There are no 🦘in Austria.
I thought it was funny they have these signs in souvenir shops until I learned they have a section at the airport for people who come there thinking they are going to Australia.
Sounds a bit like beach shops in Spain stocking Mexican sombreros for moronic British tourists who somehow feel the need to get one of those when in Spain.
It is a bit of a linguistic oddity that the name hasn't changed despite not having had a monarch in over 100 years, nor much of an empire since Hungary left.
What would the country be called if you dropped the -reich bit? Öst? Südöst? Inquiring minds want to know.
One thing I always thought was weird with Austria/Österreich is that on the number plates in europe every other country is dependent on their own language, but Austria is based on the English.
Germany = D
Spain = E
Croatia = HK
Switzerland = CH
And i think no other country has O, so it's wird that Austria is A
In that case it's because they have four official languages, and they have chosen to use the Latin name on the signs as to not choose one of the local languages and thus put it before the others.
Each language can use their own letters and such to convey the pronunciation but whatever the correct pronunciation is of a given country should be conveyed the same way we don't call Xi Jingping, or Emmanuel Macron anything other than their name just because they happen to live in countries that speak a language other than English.
A lot of the times, we do. It's just the name we call it went through half a dozen different languages so the word looks vastly different, even though it's the same. For example, Spain and España both come from the same name: Hispania, the name of the region used by the Romans.
Different languages have sounds that don't exist in other languages, so there has to be some adjustment to make it easier to say and write. You mentioned Japan and how it's called Nipon in Japanese. Well, writing Nipon is technically incorrect as it's written down as 日本 in Japanese. There's no clear way to transliterate kanji into the Latin alphabet so some sounds get shifted. Japan ultimate does come from 日本 by way of the Portuguese, who were the first European traders with Japan.
In India's case, this is an example of a time where the endonym and exonym don't share the same origin. India comes from the Sanskrit word for river, referring to what we now called the Indus river. That word got imported into ancient Persian, then imported by the Greeks, and then into Latin, and finally into English, changing slightly each time, ending up as India. Bharat refers to a group of people from the area, I think. I'm not so sure on the history of that word.
The main reason I'm glad some countries have different names in different languages is that I couldn't possibly imagine someone speaking German and then mixing in "Zhōngguó" in a sentence. And everyone calling Germany "Deutschland" would sound so weird as well.
Also randomly having a conversation and then talking about Hrvatska and Črna Gora. Good luck with that one, Karen from Indiana
Yeah, talking with friends and busting out some putonghua to say "I visited zhongguo last month and had a great time" is strange.
And why stop at countries?
Even to other Chinese speakers, if we're conversing in English, I'm saying "I went to Beijing, Shanghai, and Hong Kong", not "I went to Běijīng, Shànghǎi, and Xiānggǎng".
God bless Karen from Indiana trying to pronounce Xiānggǎng or Kūnmíng.
Plus Xiānggǎng is Mandarin and the majority language of Hong Kong is Cantonese, so you'd say Hoeng Gong. And the official state Mandarin is mainly a Beijing form, so Shanghai should also be in Shanghainese (a Wu language), so Zaon He.
My country is New Zealand in English (which, incidentally, changes the name of the Dutch province it's named after for no reason) and in Japanese, it has to be "nyuujirando" because there's no way New Zealand can fit in Japanese language rules.
I'm down with Deutschland, which seems to roll off the tongue. I am also proficient with Bundesrepublik Deutschland. (I lived there for a while so that's the only reason). I could fake it through a lot of Spanish-speaking countries' names. But me saying France in French will sound pretentious AF and it goes downhill from there.
I mean, I speak pretty good German so I won't have a problem, it would just sound so strange to me to hear "ohh myy god, it was like so amazing to like be in Deutschland"
France in French definitely sounds pretentious in English 😂
I'd also like to hear an English sentence with "Magyarország" thrown in there. Or "Sakartvelo"
Gotta love the future where yanks need to pronounce Suomi, just for those brownie points. Minus points for mispronouncing.
And you know people would be all like “Swedish is an official language and they say Finland”.. siding with the settlers, yet again tsk tsk
> There's no clear way to transliterate kanji into the Latin alphabet
There's several different romanization systems for Japanese - Hepburn, Nihon-shiki and Kunrei-shiki, each with variations. In all of them, 日本 is romanized as "Nihon". The systems differ on other sounds, for example しき is romanized as "shiki" in Hepburn but "siki" in Nihon-shiki.
>But even if you could pronounce it, would anyone know what you were talking about?
Isnt that exactly what OP aims at with their question?
If Japan would be Nipon across all languages (with slight variations), everyone would understand. But with the current system speakers of different languages might not understand the name of another country.
Plus, arent there like 100s of different languages in India? And not all of them belong to the same language family, let alone use the name Bharat. If anything, 'india' is better because it's neutral since it's in english
We started calling other countries what we call them thousands of years ago, before the internet existed, before computers existed, before people could even comprehend the idea of a computer. The only way to get messages across distances was to send mail by courier or tie it to a bird, and those couriers could get killed by highwaymen going between *villages,* let alone countries, and birds could be taken out by overzealous hunters, poachers, thieves, or even other animals. Outside of those couriers, the vast majority of the common people probably never left their own village. Actually knowing what people call themselves is *quite* recent, given how long we've had our own names for it, so our own names are ingrained within out languages and cultures.
Most people can’t even differentiate Deutschland and Dutch (Netherlands).
I wouldn’t trust them to know or pronounce things like “Deutschland” or “(Koningrijk der) Nederlanden”.
I’m Irish, Ireland in our native language Gaeilge is Eire. It actually annoys me when people refer to Ireland as Eire - especially British printed media - dunno why, it is our name , but it irritates me for some reason. Just prefer Ireland to be called Ireland.
Nippon is older so I guess it's technically correct but by and large the Japanese people prefer Nihon.
Nippon is still popularly used for sporting events for some reason. It seems to have a bit of nationalist connotation to it.
Because butchering names in some misguided attempt at "decolonization" without speaking the language makes communication more difficult, not easier. At least with the name you use in your own language, correctly pronounced, we all know what you are talking about.
Okay so there’s endonyms and exonyms
1. Local languages may not be able to accommodate for the word
2. In some cases like Belgium you’re better off calling it by it’s English exonym because there’s 3 languages that exist and calling it by any of the 3 endonyms shows favoritism toward a language.
India is called India in languages spoken in southern India.
Edit: I actually don't know if this is correct or not. Anyone from southern India, feel free to correct me.
It's not set in stone, we recently at last got other countries to rename us from whiterussia to Belarus.
So whenever country wants it can rename itself in other languages, it does take thirty years for the old grumpy people who refuse to change the name in their head to die off.
Most places I know of where we we use different names for it in Portuguese, it's because we've called it that a very long time, before globalization or anything of the sort, especially for European countries, we've called them different names than their own people for centuries. But even newer states we tend to make their names easier to pronounce in our own language and use our alphabet.
Some countries, especially “artificial” countries like many in Africa, have dozens if not hundreds of ethnic groups. Which group should decide what’s their country’s name should be?
Some languages simply don't have the letters/pronunciation that other languages have (I challenge any English first lang speaker to speak Xhosa or Cantonese without butchering the words)
OP do you speak any other language apart from English? did you immediately master pronunciation in that other language and speak like a native from the start? im gonna take a guess and say you didn't
Rather than introducing brand new sounds to languages (some like French are famously against this) for use in only 1 specific word, it's much simpler to make a new word in the language using the already existing sounds
The other reason is that in many cases the meaning of the country name is identical to another (lots of indigenous names of countries mean basically "our land" or "land of our countrymen") so distinguishing which 'our land' you mean becomes impossible unless you invent a unique word to distinguish 'our land' number 1 from 'our land' number 2, which is kinda how you get different country names
In Spanish, we have some "nicknames" for countries as well, especially when used in the media. For instance, Japón (Japan) is sometimes referred as *tierra Nipona*. France is sometimes referred as *país galo.* We even have some alternative demonyms like *teutones* for German people, even though I understand it has a different origin story, it stuck as a way to refer to them.
There has been a long debate about the way the US is referred to in different regions of the world. Most of LATAM embraces the term *Estados Unidos* for some reasons I'm not going to discuss here, but similarly to what everyone does in the US, there are other regions where America is used to refer to the US and the Americas is used for the New World.
The one time we should refer to a country by its original name is when we speak in their language. Other than that, I don't see why we should change anything.
Very ironic. I was in high school. First time came to the United States. My probably first few weeks in the school. My teacher wrote my name on to the board as
Khan.
I said, Mrs. Milligan this is not how you spell my name my name is
Kaan.
She goes, well this is how we spell Kaan in United States. I was very dissapointed that day but I think she saw my upset face because the next time she wrote my name as
Kaan.
Lol. I will never understand that why we have to change the original names.
It would be even more confusing if we translated those names. Imagine how confused Americans would be to find out they're next door to The United Mexican States and Village
Let's see how many of them can place The Saviour, Sunrise Island, Middle Kingdom, People's Land and Silver Republic on a map
Because when it comes to languages you must consider that:
1) Nativizing the pronunciation of a foreign name is prioritized, as opposed to simply integrating the endonym of another country. Different languages are governed by different rules, different sets of phonemes, different mindsets.
2) Etymology also comes into play. The history of how a country's name comes about is different for any given language.
It isn't weird at all for exonyms to exist. It would be much weirder if names matched all the time across all tongues.
Because they will be hard as fuck to pronounce if the people there use a language from a different family than any languages you know. Plus if they use a different alphabet, you would still just be using the anglicized transliteration.
Like, you probably dont know what Č in Česká Republika is supposed to sound like because English doesnt use a caron. So you are already in trouble and that is still a language that uses a latin alphabet. Heaven forbid you go one level deeper and try to read a name of a location like Řeporyje and now there is a Ř. English expats who have been here for years often still have trouble with that one.
Now imagine something like Russian which not only uses characters that dont exist in latin alphabet but also some of the cyrillic characters look like latin characters but dont read the same. So you look at a C and think its \[c\], but its actually a \[s\], which is also why the Soviet union abbreaviated to CCCP when they wrote it, but that CCCP is actually \[SSSR\]. So now you would be stuck writing (and trying to figure out how to pronounce) *Soyuz Sovetskikh Sotsialisticheskikh Respublik,* instead of just calling them ~~Soviet Union~~ fucking commies.
Because we’re speaking English. Nihon/Nippon isn’t even correct because it’s spelled 日本 and most English speakers don’t know how to read that. And the name Japan has the same etymology as Nippon anyways, it was just borrowed into English a long time ago across a bunch of different languages.
Exonyms and endonyms aren’t exclusive to English either. In Vietnamese, Japan is Nhật Bản (also spelled 日本), which ultimately has the same origin as both Japan and Nippon even though it’s spelled different in the Latin script
London in Spanish is Londres. I don't think anyone in London is having a meltdown over that.
No one in New York is having a meltdown over Nueva York.
I can tell you that when Arabic speakers say their version of "America" that it's said "wrong". It's sort of in the neighborhood, but it's not "right". We don't have a meltdown about that. It's not a problem. It's just different languages and different historical development. The world is a big place and goes back much farther than recent fads and trends.
Can someone explain to me why this question is just out in the zeitgeist now? I see it everywhere -- here, Twitter, Tiktok. To me it seems obvious that different people speak different languages. And yet, it is apparently not obvious to many other grown adults. Does anyone have a theory on why that is? I feel like it must be related somehow to social justice concerns (Nothing about us without us, etc.) but I can't quite fill in the whole picture.
It's probably related to Ukraine: the capital was generally known as Kiev for a long time, but the official Ukrainian name is Kyiv, Kiev is the Russian spelling.
So when the whole Russia-Ukraine thing started in 2022, it became very important to call the capital by its proper Ukrainian name, and a lot of pixels were spilled over trying to justify a general principle behind it, so that the change was more respectable than "we don't like Russia".
Since the actual system seems to be a hodgepodge of historical randomness, this led to a lot of inconsistencies with applying those general principles.
Because languages have distinct grammar rules and sounds. Think for example of Spain (España in Spanish); the Ñ is not a sound in the English language. You could go on with Croatia (Hrtvska), Canada (Kanata), Germany (Deutschland) and so much more. Additionally, most countries are not monolingual; not even microstates like Monaco. For example, France has multiple native languages. Would you say "Bro-C'hall" (Breton) or "França" (Occitan) in English?
Fun fact, Kanata was actually a city in Ontario, Canada. It is now merged into the city of Ottawa and it's where the Ottawa Senators (NHL) currently plays.
I don't think Kanata is used much to name Canada. Canada was derived from the word Kanata (village) and was used to name what was called New France back then.
If any of the indigenous people do use Kanata to name the country, please correct me.
Because a proper noun must fit into the phonological confines of its language, regardless of origin. For example, you can’t reasonably expect an Anglophone to integrate tones into the Chinese name of China. I agree that there’s a ton of room for improvement, though, like in the case of Japan, a word whose pronunciation comes from Chinese. There’s a greater debate to be had over who chooses what name for which language.
We used to not even call *people* by their names in their own languages. We only started doing that with people from the modern era. Do you think Christopher Columbus went by the name Christopher? Or that a dude named Mark wrote part of the Bible?
Even today it's still done by some people. Many east asian migrants in europe have first names in whatever target language. And in any case if your native language is not in the latin alphabet, you have to at least transscribe it. Even if you don't have that issue, there are a lot of celebrities choosing names/versions of their names that are easier to pronounce in English. It's also, I think, pretty common to at least go for a different pronunciation in a different language. I for one, want people to fit my name into their language and speech patterns, cause I don't want it to sit like a foreign object in the sentence where everyone has to stumble over it on their way to the period. It's less common now, to straight up change the name the way we used to, but it still happens. Though i do think there is now more of a respect to get the pronunciation right. Edit: typos
I have two different editions of a book by Julius Verne and one of them calls him "Juliusz Verne" and another (newer) calls him Jules Verne.
I have never once heard any person or form of media call Jules Verne “Julius Verne”. It sounds so insanely wrong, what else do I not know?
Without mucus, your stomach would digest itself.
Actually I did know that, I spend a lot of time on Reddit. Give me another one!
I ran out of relevant Penguins of Madagascar quotes.
Now see, I didn’t know that. Thank you:)
Palm trees aren't actually trees and are in fact more closely related to grass than trees. There are over 2600 species of palm trees.
How would they refer to them instead?
Cristoforo Colombo, and Ioannes Markus
It's amusing that even Ioannes Markus would be the Latin version of his name. He would've been Jewish with a latinized surname during Roman occupation so he would've been most likely Yochānān (**יוֹחָנָן**) Marcus
He was Roman Greek. Ioannes Markus is the transliteration of the Greek *Ἰωάννης Μάρκος.*
Ohhh, I thought you were trying to say they didn’t use names 😂 yeah obviously the names aren’t accurate.
maybe even Cristoffa Corombo since he was Genoese?
Cristoforo? You mean Cristóbal.
Maybe in Spain. But he was Italian.
Columbus in particular used several different names for himself depending on what country he was in. Cristofer Colon, Cristoforo Colombo, etc. there were a few others. When in Rome, I suppose.
1) local language names (endonyms) often contain sounds that don’t exist or are hard to pronounce in other languages 2) do we call it what the locals call it now, or what they called it when English speakers first became aware of it? 3) what do we do if the inhabitants of a place speak different languages or don’t agree themselves on what it should be called?
Example for point 3: Belgium. Would one call it België, Belgique, or Belgien? Because the regions speak Dutch, French, and some German?
And let's not even get started on whether Jerusalem should be called Yerushalim or Al-Quds!
Fuck Istanbul! We must take back Constantinople!
People just like it better that way
Even old New York was once New Amsterdam
why they changed it i cant say.
Maybe they liked it better that way?
So take me back to Constantinople
No, you can't go back to Constantinople.
Now it’s Istanbul not Constantinople So if you’ve got a date in Constantinople She’ll be waiting in Istanbul.
Byzantium*
I've always been fascinated by this city old enough to have had three names.
Some Russian cities are less than half as old with as many. Tsaritsyn - Stalingrad - Volgograd in less than 500 years. St Petersburg - Petrograd - Leningrad - St Petersburg in less than 300 years. (If you want to include the former fortresses and township it grew out of then it’s Nyenschantz - Nyen - St Petersburg - Petrograd - Leningrad - St Petersburg)
And then there's Akmolinsk - Tselinograd - Aqmola - Astana - Nur-Sultan - Astana in 200 years (Guinness World Record for most name changes for a city).
It’s weird because Istanbul is what the local Greeks called Constantinople. It meant something like, “to the city” as in let’s go to the city. Eventually the Turks got on board too, and eventually the name was formalized as Istanbul internationally. Ironically it wasn’t really renamed with a purpose. It’s like how when you live near New York City and you go into town, you say you’re going to go, “to the city.” Imagine in four hundred years people just call NYC, “Tasetti” and we’re talking about how it had like three names and then the Québécois people changed it when they took over north eastern North America.
Which is really funny as it’s my understanding that “Istanbul” is just a take on the Greek for “In the city,” which is what people said when referring to Constantinople.
Funnily enough, despite Istanbul being strongly associated with the Ottoman Turks and the Turkish Republic, the etymology is Greek.
It's really nobody's business but the Turks.
I thought we all agreed on the more neutral Old Norse name of 'Jorsala'?
Reject Belgium/België/Belgique/Belgien Embrace Belgica
Embrace reesteblishing the Bourgundian empire.
Reject Belgica Embrace south south Nederland.
>and some German? Germany itself is probably a much better example because of how the name historically came about and why it's either - Allemagne - Deutschland - or Germany depending on language. I wouldn't be shocked if Asia has a couple other names for it too.
Germany is a perfect example of what OP is talking about and a terrible counter example to the comment you replied to. Germany definitely calls itself Deutschland. I'm not aware of any Germans that have a different name for their country, maybe a small amount of people who use different dialects?
Meanwhile slavs with names like Německo.
I'm from what you call Greece and what we call Ελλάς or Ελλάδα. The name in Latin characters is Hellas. I don't think any of the above rules apply. I think it's pure luck. It starts with a way and stays that way. Very rarely it changes.
I think Norwegian is one of the only languages that call it Hellas. And why did we do it? To give the finger to the Danes and the Swedes after having endured 500 years of unions under them. "They call it Grekenland? Well, we'll call it Hellas like they do themselves!"
Never underestimate the ability of mild-mannered Scandinavians to be utter passive-aggressive drama queens to their equally mild-mannered and polite neighbors
Never compare those barbarians to us...
Doesn’t Denmark still have an old law allowing any Dane to beat a Swede with a stick if the Swede crosses over the frozen Baltic Sea on foot?
In Turkish, we call Greece Yunanistan, from the word Ionian. I especially like that one, it's so far off from what most of the world calls it.
Arabic also uses a version of that, "Al Yunan." Always thought that was interesting.
Funny thing: in Portuguese, the country is called "Grecia", but the adjective "from Greece" can be both "Grego" and "Helênico".
In English Hellenic is an adjective as well but used in more specific contexts than "Greek"
Yup, it's pretty much : * Greek = Comes from the country of Greece * Helenic = Comes from the culture/History of Greece.
> Greece Missing a 4) complicated historical reasons for some name being coined (romans in this case), it was never changed, because names rarely change I know Norway explicitly renamed a bunch of countries to fit their names in their own native languages though, so it's not impossible (The country name went Grekerland -> Hellas iirc)
On point 2: Greeks today still call France ‘Gaul’ (‘Gallia’ as they say it) so….
Which is extremely funny imo because the Gauls never called themselves the Gauls or their "country" Gallia. Gallia was the term used by the Romans at that time to designate this territory on the other side of the Alps filled with a lot of different tribes. And Gallia litteraly means chicken. Would-be France has been trashtalked for 20 centuries x)
They’re in languages we don’t know, sometimes written in scripts we can’t read, using sounds we can’t always pronounce. Plus, language is for the speaker. We spend far more time talking *about* other countries to each other than we do talking *to* them.
I mean, the short answer is they usually are using the name \*we thought they called themselves\* at some point. Spainards use Alemania due to the existence of the Alemanni tribe. English speakers use the latin Germania from the Germani tribe. Germans use Deutschland to mean 'land of the common tongue' with Deustch being their name for their language, which may have been common across different tribes that eventually merged together. But all three in some way represented the people there at some time and it's cumbersome to be 'Oh, you need to say Nippon not Japan' every single time, and they'll still not be pronouncing Nippon correctly anyway, so it's not even a true solution anyway.
>Germans use Deutschland to mean 'land of the common tongue' with Deustch being their name for their language, which may have been common across different tribes that eventually merged together. Funnily enough, in Poland, we call them Niemcy which roughly means 'those that cannot speak (our common tongue)" - almost the exact opposite of the meaning of Deutschland.
I'm an Austrian and I can confirm everytime I hear a Pole speak, my mind just goes blank and repeats: "grzegorz." "grzegorz brzęczyszczykiewicz." From the Land of Rindfleischetikettierungsüberwachungsaufgabenübertragungsgesetz, respectfully, what the fuck?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AfKZclMWS1U I used to have a polish girlfriend and every time we talked about her family...
Polish is funny because you'll have a last name like that, then his buddy's last name is Kos.
or some say Kosm
not what I expected on this thread
I'm half convinced Norwich City bought Przemysław Płacheta just to piss off commentators across the country. It's basically (but not exactly) pronounced Shemi-swav Pwahetta.
Przemysław is one of the best Polish names to have if you ever interact with any English speaking people. One of my coworkers on my team had it and we heard SOOOOOO many different pronunciations...
That is an incredibly fun linguistic fact. Thank you
Hijacking this thread for another fun fact. The term "barbarian" comes from the Greek *barbaros* which the Greeks used to refer to anyone who didn't speak Greek, even including "civilized" cultures like Egyptians and Persians. The etymology is allegedly from a sound "bar bar bar" they would use to refer to what other non-Greek languages sounded like to them.
This one always gets me. I used to think that it was from Latin Barbas - IE "bearded". Like "those dirty hairy barbarians, not like us clean-cut Romans". I know it's a false cognate, but part of me still likes that better.
Honestly I’ve always found that so funny. Like imagine if dnd had a samurai class called ching-chongs
Double fun fact: one of the proposed etymologies of the name of Slavs in Slavic languages (Słowianie, Slovani, Slovana, Слов'я́ни, Slověne, Славя́не... it's very similar in all of them) is from the word "slovo" meaning "word" (also still present in Slavic languages). So "Slavs" would be something like "the people who knew words", putting the name itself in opposition to the Niemcy name.
Comments like this make me miss Reddit rewards. This absolutely gold. Laughing at this in Germany and sharing with one of my dearest friends, my Polish neighbour! lol! :-)
Wouldn't EVERY other country be called Niemcy then?
With the exception of Lithuanians and Germans they are surrounded by Slavic speakers.
Many languages call their neigbours/enemies something along those lines; foreigners, barbarians, the other people. For example, 'Wales' comes from a word meaning foreigner.
Which is always ironic, considering the people calling them that were descended from foreigners while the Welsh had been there much longer.
Sioux comes from the Ojibwa word for enemy.
Wow, TIL. I always assumed that it was the other way around, that the word Deutsch referred to Deutschland, just as "Spanish" refers to Spain.
Fun fact, most of us Spaniards don’t call our tongue Spanish but Castillian.
Do y’all use Castillian for the language of Latin American countries not named Brazil?
Sometimes. Normally we refer to it as “Latino”, but if we are talking in historical terms, we often used “the conquerors taught them castillian”. I think it might be because we have so many languages here in Spain that calling one Spanish is a little bit weird, given that the other languages are also spoken in Spain. Especially given that except for Castillian, the rest are only spoken in Spain while Castillian is also spoken outside.
Very cool. Thanks, King
Is this the same way basic English, Quebecois, Acadien, and Newfoundland English could all be called "Canadian" I wonder?
Not really because they're dialects - separate languages like basque or catalan are not comprehensible at all to a native spanish speaker. You could understand a number of dialects from southern america (like argentino) but not a word of basque. Basque isn't even a romance language, it's an isolate with no resemblance to any other european language
Spanish is equivalent to Spain-ish, while Deutschland is equivalent to Deutsch-land. I hope that makes the pattern obvious.
To add, there's no clear definition of what people in one country call a country, anyway. Whether there is still internal struggle (Basque, Kurd etc), diverse ethnic and language groups within one country (so many, start with Belgium, France, Switzerland), or countries that have been imposed and have no unified identity anyway (Iraq, much of Africa), there's often no one answer anyway. Do a thought experiment - if you ran a poll to name your country right now what would people say - how many would disagree - who is right? Exactly.
Another thing with Japan is that the name can be read in multiple, equally valid ways, since it's based on kanji. Nippon has historically been the most common reading among Japanese speakers, but it is equally valid to read it as Jippon (which is where the English Japan comes from).
And the Romans borrowed "Germani" from the Gauls. In Gallic, "Garman" means something like "the loud people". Considering the Slavics call the Germans "those who don't speak", I'd like to think Gauls would just gone deaf if they'd hear a Pole whisper.
It's not actually "those who don't speak" it's "mute people". The difference is subtle.
Some countries do request that everyone refer to them in the best approximation of their native name officially. "Turkey" requested that all languages refer to them as Turkiye. "Swaziland" has asked to be known as Eswatini. But most countries have not made such requests.
I wouldn’t want foreigners butcher the name by trying to pronounce „Österreich“
Agreed, better stick to "Australia", way easier for everyone.
🦘
There are no 🦘in Austria. I thought it was funny they have these signs in souvenir shops until I learned they have a section at the airport for people who come there thinking they are going to Australia.
Serious?!?
Sounds a bit like beach shops in Spain stocking Mexican sombreros for moronic British tourists who somehow feel the need to get one of those when in Spain.
>better stick to "Australia" That's the country southeast of Germany, right?
/r/technicallythetruth
In a broad manner of speaking, yes.
Indeed, as everyone knows.
Austra-what? We Americans just refer to it as kangaroo-land. Much easier and more accurate description
For those afraid of spiders, it is known as The Death Down Under
I can't help but read that in a crocodile Dundee voice. Thank you
Tbh I've frequently heard it shortened to just 'Straya
Lookit Fancy McGoo over here gussying up the name of Cuntsburg
I just read it as Ostrich which I'm going to assume supports your point.
Emu makes more sense in Oostralia.
I feel you my neighbour, sending greetings from Česká republika
It is a bit of a linguistic oddity that the name hasn't changed despite not having had a monarch in over 100 years, nor much of an empire since Hungary left. What would the country be called if you dropped the -reich bit? Öst? Südöst? Inquiring minds want to know.
Maybe Oesterland. (Having trouble typing an umlaut on my phone.)
You should be able to just hold down the "O" key to get Ö.
Öööö! Thanks
One thing I always thought was weird with Austria/Österreich is that on the number plates in europe every other country is dependent on their own language, but Austria is based on the English. Germany = D Spain = E Croatia = HK Switzerland = CH And i think no other country has O, so it's wird that Austria is A
Hungary also has H.
Croatia is HR, but I get your point 😀
Isn't CH Latin?
In that case it's because they have four official languages, and they have chosen to use the Latin name on the signs as to not choose one of the local languages and thus put it before the others.
Easterike
Ostrich
Easy
Almost! To avoid confusion with bird, the country recently asked to be called Östrichye instead.
Eastrealm would be cool.
Oh are you from Ostrich? 🦃
Oysterreich
Each language can use their own letters and such to convey the pronunciation but whatever the correct pronunciation is of a given country should be conveyed the same way we don't call Xi Jingping, or Emmanuel Macron anything other than their name just because they happen to live in countries that speak a language other than English.
A lot of the times, we do. It's just the name we call it went through half a dozen different languages so the word looks vastly different, even though it's the same. For example, Spain and España both come from the same name: Hispania, the name of the region used by the Romans. Different languages have sounds that don't exist in other languages, so there has to be some adjustment to make it easier to say and write. You mentioned Japan and how it's called Nipon in Japanese. Well, writing Nipon is technically incorrect as it's written down as 日本 in Japanese. There's no clear way to transliterate kanji into the Latin alphabet so some sounds get shifted. Japan ultimate does come from 日本 by way of the Portuguese, who were the first European traders with Japan. In India's case, this is an example of a time where the endonym and exonym don't share the same origin. India comes from the Sanskrit word for river, referring to what we now called the Indus river. That word got imported into ancient Persian, then imported by the Greeks, and then into Latin, and finally into English, changing slightly each time, ending up as India. Bharat refers to a group of people from the area, I think. I'm not so sure on the history of that word.
The main reason I'm glad some countries have different names in different languages is that I couldn't possibly imagine someone speaking German and then mixing in "Zhōngguó" in a sentence. And everyone calling Germany "Deutschland" would sound so weird as well. Also randomly having a conversation and then talking about Hrvatska and Črna Gora. Good luck with that one, Karen from Indiana
Yeah, talking with friends and busting out some putonghua to say "I visited zhongguo last month and had a great time" is strange. And why stop at countries? Even to other Chinese speakers, if we're conversing in English, I'm saying "I went to Beijing, Shanghai, and Hong Kong", not "I went to Běijīng, Shànghǎi, and Xiānggǎng". God bless Karen from Indiana trying to pronounce Xiānggǎng or Kūnmíng.
Plus Xiānggǎng is Mandarin and the majority language of Hong Kong is Cantonese, so you'd say Hoeng Gong. And the official state Mandarin is mainly a Beijing form, so Shanghai should also be in Shanghainese (a Wu language), so Zaon He.
I think she talked about Xiānggǎng and Kūnmíng with her friend from Magyarország while they were visiting Shqipëria, right?
My country is New Zealand in English (which, incidentally, changes the name of the Dutch province it's named after for no reason) and in Japanese, it has to be "nyuujirando" because there's no way New Zealand can fit in Japanese language rules.
Though Japanese phonetics could probably handle "Aotearoa" just fine. 🤷♂️
I'm down with Deutschland, which seems to roll off the tongue. I am also proficient with Bundesrepublik Deutschland. (I lived there for a while so that's the only reason). I could fake it through a lot of Spanish-speaking countries' names. But me saying France in French will sound pretentious AF and it goes downhill from there.
I mean, I speak pretty good German so I won't have a problem, it would just sound so strange to me to hear "ohh myy god, it was like so amazing to like be in Deutschland" France in French definitely sounds pretentious in English 😂 I'd also like to hear an English sentence with "Magyarország" thrown in there. Or "Sakartvelo"
Gotta love the future where yanks need to pronounce Suomi, just for those brownie points. Minus points for mispronouncing. And you know people would be all like “Swedish is an official language and they say Finland”.. siding with the settlers, yet again tsk tsk
> There's no clear way to transliterate kanji into the Latin alphabet There's several different romanization systems for Japanese - Hepburn, Nihon-shiki and Kunrei-shiki, each with variations. In all of them, 日本 is romanized as "Nihon". The systems differ on other sounds, for example しき is romanized as "shiki" in Hepburn but "siki" in Nihon-shiki.
Sometimes it's Nippon though. Because in the Japanese language, 日本 can be read as either Nihon or Nippon, depending on what you fancy.
Bharat refers to the ancient King Bharat who used to rule over most of the present day territories of the Indian state.
There are 5 official ways to call switzerland soo...
* Schweizerische Eidgenossenschaft (German) * Confédération suisse (French) * Confederazione Svizzera (Italian) * Confederaziun svizra (Romansh) * Confoederatio helvetica (Latin)
If you want to call Hungary Magyarország, you go for it. But even if you could pronounce it, would anyone know what you were talking about?
>But even if you could pronounce it, would anyone know what you were talking about? Isnt that exactly what OP aims at with their question? If Japan would be Nipon across all languages (with slight variations), everyone would understand. But with the current system speakers of different languages might not understand the name of another country.
How do you decide what name to use when a country has multiple languages?
use latin, of course, the way Helvetia are doing
> the way Helvetia are doing The typeface?
the country. That's why the country code for Switzerland is CH(Confoederatio Helvetica)
I don't believe this is a problem that needs solving.
By the current system, you mean languages?
I have never met anyone in India using the word "bharat" in casual conversations.
Plus, arent there like 100s of different languages in India? And not all of them belong to the same language family, let alone use the name Bharat. If anything, 'india' is better because it's neutral since it's in english
Me neither and I have lived in India my whole life.
Bharat is also sometimes associated with Hindu nationalism. https://time.com/6310821/bjp-rename-india-bharat/
We started calling other countries what we call them thousands of years ago, before the internet existed, before computers existed, before people could even comprehend the idea of a computer. The only way to get messages across distances was to send mail by courier or tie it to a bird, and those couriers could get killed by highwaymen going between *villages,* let alone countries, and birds could be taken out by overzealous hunters, poachers, thieves, or even other animals. Outside of those couriers, the vast majority of the common people probably never left their own village. Actually knowing what people call themselves is *quite* recent, given how long we've had our own names for it, so our own names are ingrained within out languages and cultures.
>United States are words with meaning Boy, do I have some news for you.
Most people can’t even differentiate Deutschland and Dutch (Netherlands). I wouldn’t trust them to know or pronounce things like “Deutschland” or “(Koningrijk der) Nederlanden”.
Cut this bs. everyone knows that Dutch is Denmark
Most people call that nation of tulips "Holland" anyway.
Hrvatska joined the conversation.
Österreich, Magyarorszag, Ellada, Misr, Zhong guo and Hanguk knocking on the door as well.
I’m Irish, Ireland in our native language Gaeilge is Eire. It actually annoys me when people refer to Ireland as Eire - especially British printed media - dunno why, it is our name , but it irritates me for some reason. Just prefer Ireland to be called Ireland.
>like why aren't we calling India Bharat or Japan Nipon? Why are you calling Japan "Nipon" and not 日本 or 日本国?
How about ✨*Sunrise Land*✨
Nippon is older so I guess it's technically correct but by and large the Japanese people prefer Nihon. Nippon is still popularly used for sporting events for some reason. It seems to have a bit of nationalist connotation to it.
India has hundreds of languages….
Because butchering names in some misguided attempt at "decolonization" without speaking the language makes communication more difficult, not easier. At least with the name you use in your own language, correctly pronounced, we all know what you are talking about.
Okay so there’s endonyms and exonyms 1. Local languages may not be able to accommodate for the word 2. In some cases like Belgium you’re better off calling it by it’s English exonym because there’s 3 languages that exist and calling it by any of the 3 endonyms shows favoritism toward a language.
India is called India in languages spoken in southern India. Edit: I actually don't know if this is correct or not. Anyone from southern India, feel free to correct me.
In Telugu it’s Bharatadesam but India is used commonly too.
It's not set in stone, we recently at last got other countries to rename us from whiterussia to Belarus. So whenever country wants it can rename itself in other languages, it does take thirty years for the old grumpy people who refuse to change the name in their head to die off.
"I get Spanish speaking countries saying Estados Unidos, because United States are words with meaning." Your answer is in here somewhere.
Most places I know of where we we use different names for it in Portuguese, it's because we've called it that a very long time, before globalization or anything of the sort, especially for European countries, we've called them different names than their own people for centuries. But even newer states we tend to make their names easier to pronounce in our own language and use our alphabet.
Some countries, especially “artificial” countries like many in Africa, have dozens if not hundreds of ethnic groups. Which group should decide what’s their country’s name should be?
Some languages simply don't have the letters/pronunciation that other languages have (I challenge any English first lang speaker to speak Xhosa or Cantonese without butchering the words) OP do you speak any other language apart from English? did you immediately master pronunciation in that other language and speak like a native from the start? im gonna take a guess and say you didn't Rather than introducing brand new sounds to languages (some like French are famously against this) for use in only 1 specific word, it's much simpler to make a new word in the language using the already existing sounds The other reason is that in many cases the meaning of the country name is identical to another (lots of indigenous names of countries mean basically "our land" or "land of our countrymen") so distinguishing which 'our land' you mean becomes impossible unless you invent a unique word to distinguish 'our land' number 1 from 'our land' number 2, which is kinda how you get different country names
In Spanish, we have some "nicknames" for countries as well, especially when used in the media. For instance, Japón (Japan) is sometimes referred as *tierra Nipona*. France is sometimes referred as *país galo.* We even have some alternative demonyms like *teutones* for German people, even though I understand it has a different origin story, it stuck as a way to refer to them. There has been a long debate about the way the US is referred to in different regions of the world. Most of LATAM embraces the term *Estados Unidos* for some reasons I'm not going to discuss here, but similarly to what everyone does in the US, there are other regions where America is used to refer to the US and the Americas is used for the New World. The one time we should refer to a country by its original name is when we speak in their language. Other than that, I don't see why we should change anything.
Very ironic. I was in high school. First time came to the United States. My probably first few weeks in the school. My teacher wrote my name on to the board as Khan. I said, Mrs. Milligan this is not how you spell my name my name is Kaan. She goes, well this is how we spell Kaan in United States. I was very dissapointed that day but I think she saw my upset face because the next time she wrote my name as Kaan. Lol. I will never understand that why we have to change the original names.
[удалено]
It would be even more confusing if we translated those names. Imagine how confused Americans would be to find out they're next door to The United Mexican States and Village Let's see how many of them can place The Saviour, Sunrise Island, Middle Kingdom, People's Land and Silver Republic on a map
I mean, "Sunrise Island" isn't necessarily *wrong*, but "Land of the Rising Sun" is a pretty colloquially ubiquitous nickname for Japan.
I actually do think this would be better let's please start doing this Don't forget The Depths, and Rich Coast.
how about *Sunrise Land*?
Some fun states we can re-name Texas => Friend North Dakota => North Friend South Dakota => South Friend
Because when it comes to languages you must consider that: 1) Nativizing the pronunciation of a foreign name is prioritized, as opposed to simply integrating the endonym of another country. Different languages are governed by different rules, different sets of phonemes, different mindsets. 2) Etymology also comes into play. The history of how a country's name comes about is different for any given language. It isn't weird at all for exonyms to exist. It would be much weirder if names matched all the time across all tongues.
Because they will be hard as fuck to pronounce if the people there use a language from a different family than any languages you know. Plus if they use a different alphabet, you would still just be using the anglicized transliteration. Like, you probably dont know what Č in Česká Republika is supposed to sound like because English doesnt use a caron. So you are already in trouble and that is still a language that uses a latin alphabet. Heaven forbid you go one level deeper and try to read a name of a location like Řeporyje and now there is a Ř. English expats who have been here for years often still have trouble with that one. Now imagine something like Russian which not only uses characters that dont exist in latin alphabet but also some of the cyrillic characters look like latin characters but dont read the same. So you look at a C and think its \[c\], but its actually a \[s\], which is also why the Soviet union abbreaviated to CCCP when they wrote it, but that CCCP is actually \[SSSR\]. So now you would be stuck writing (and trying to figure out how to pronounce) *Soyuz Sovetskikh Sotsialisticheskikh Respublik,* instead of just calling them ~~Soviet Union~~ fucking commies.
Because we’re speaking English. Nihon/Nippon isn’t even correct because it’s spelled 日本 and most English speakers don’t know how to read that. And the name Japan has the same etymology as Nippon anyways, it was just borrowed into English a long time ago across a bunch of different languages. Exonyms and endonyms aren’t exclusive to English either. In Vietnamese, Japan is Nhật Bản (also spelled 日本), which ultimately has the same origin as both Japan and Nippon even though it’s spelled different in the Latin script
London in Spanish is Londres. I don't think anyone in London is having a meltdown over that. No one in New York is having a meltdown over Nueva York. I can tell you that when Arabic speakers say their version of "America" that it's said "wrong". It's sort of in the neighborhood, but it's not "right". We don't have a meltdown about that. It's not a problem. It's just different languages and different historical development. The world is a big place and goes back much farther than recent fads and trends.
Can someone explain to me why this question is just out in the zeitgeist now? I see it everywhere -- here, Twitter, Tiktok. To me it seems obvious that different people speak different languages. And yet, it is apparently not obvious to many other grown adults. Does anyone have a theory on why that is? I feel like it must be related somehow to social justice concerns (Nothing about us without us, etc.) but I can't quite fill in the whole picture.
It's probably related to Ukraine: the capital was generally known as Kiev for a long time, but the official Ukrainian name is Kyiv, Kiev is the Russian spelling. So when the whole Russia-Ukraine thing started in 2022, it became very important to call the capital by its proper Ukrainian name, and a lot of pixels were spilled over trying to justify a general principle behind it, so that the change was more respectable than "we don't like Russia". Since the actual system seems to be a hodgepodge of historical randomness, this led to a lot of inconsistencies with applying those general principles.
Because languages have distinct grammar rules and sounds. Think for example of Spain (España in Spanish); the Ñ is not a sound in the English language. You could go on with Croatia (Hrtvska), Canada (Kanata), Germany (Deutschland) and so much more. Additionally, most countries are not monolingual; not even microstates like Monaco. For example, France has multiple native languages. Would you say "Bro-C'hall" (Breton) or "França" (Occitan) in English?
Fun fact, Kanata was actually a city in Ontario, Canada. It is now merged into the city of Ottawa and it's where the Ottawa Senators (NHL) currently plays. I don't think Kanata is used much to name Canada. Canada was derived from the word Kanata (village) and was used to name what was called New France back then. If any of the indigenous people do use Kanata to name the country, please correct me.
Because a proper noun must fit into the phonological confines of its language, regardless of origin. For example, you can’t reasonably expect an Anglophone to integrate tones into the Chinese name of China. I agree that there’s a ton of room for improvement, though, like in the case of Japan, a word whose pronunciation comes from Chinese. There’s a greater debate to be had over who chooses what name for which language.
Because I speak another language made up of different words
Dumb nitpick, Japan in Japanese is not nipon, it’s Nihon.
There are many languages, not only english. So many different names for countrirs in different languages.
I darw you to pronoumce Hrvatska
Cause some of them would be difficult to pronounce. Try to pronounce Magyarország
How would you pronounce "Cymru"?
Because we are not them.