Quote:
Originally posted by Epona:
Yorick, you've hit on one of my pet hates there! I hate that place names get 'anglicized' or even completely changed in English to something different than the name the locals call a place. I realise that place names have and will probably continue to change as people move, languages change, cultures change etc. these things are always dynamic. But I think it is better to use as a standard name whatever the 'locals' use - Deutschland is not a difficult word in any language. Place names are of course written in a variety of characters and alphabets, but where they are translated into a different alphabet this should be done phonetically so the sound of the word stays true, not just given a different name.
Oh, back on topic  I'm from England, born in Surrey (South East of the country) live in London, but an internationalist and citizen of the world.
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Epona, ma'am, Yorick, Sir Tainly,
please forgive me, but I beg to differ: that countries/cities have their own names in different languages is an integral part of the respective language/culture and also very telling about the historic relationship and ties between the two countries and cultures (the "naming" one and the one being "named"). So, to eradicate these names would strike me as exceptionally oblivious of history, as "unhistoric" in the worst possible meaning. Please also note: having own names for "geographic entities" is not a sign of ignorance between countries as a result of being far away from each other, but quite to the contrary, is most frequent among neighbouring countries and cultures.
By all of the above, I am, of course, not advocating the kind of ignorance displayed by Yorick's Australian friends in Singapore, but for me the consequence is one that requires a little work: every educated individual should strive to know the names in at least 3 languages - in English, the lingua franca of this age, in the respective country's language(s) and in his/her native language (Milan, Milano, Mailand; Barcelona, Barcelona, Barcelona ... hey, wait a minute ...
).
To give you another, rather solemn, example: As you might know, at the end of WW II, Germany had to cede vast territories in its east to Poland (and a small part to the USSR), which in turn had to cede large territories to the USSR. The German population, a total of 13 Mio. fom all of Eastern Europe, were expelled.
Because this territories had been German for 800 years, it took about 30 years until all major segments of the German society had fully accepted the irrevocability of this loss. This process was obviously helped by the enormity of Germany's guilt in WW II and the fact that the long postwar economic boom facilitated the integration of the expellees into the West German society.
At around the time, the mid seventies, it become fashionable in the media to call the cities in those former German territories by their Polish names - like Wroclaw instead of Breslau for the capital of Silesia - and anything else was considered "revanchist". Now, after the Berlin Wall had come down, the cultural interchange between Germany and Poland reintensified. Many Poles of all ages speak German remarkably well. None of them ever hesitated one second to call Breslau Breslau or considered to call it Wroclaw when speaking German.
( Yorick, my friend, my true reason for opposing you on this matter, is of course that I fear that your attempts to name things in their original languages
might result in more cases of "sausages" ...
)
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So long !
R³ - Co-president(s) of the Club of Broken Hearts
[This message has been edited by Ramon de Ramon y Ramon (edited 04-01-2001).]