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Renaming the cities of other countries... | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| shk00design Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 4452 days ago 747 posts - 1123 votes  Speaks: Cantonese*, English, Mandarin Studies: French | Message 185 of 192 28 September 2012 at 5:57am | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||
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Some names like Japan remain the same except the locals always refer it as Nihon 日本. Place name like Shanghai in
Chinese is still Shanghai except that the accent on the "hai" is pronunce a bit different in Mandarin than you would in English. The Chinese city Canton came from the English in the 19th century. The Chinese has always referred to it as Guangzhou (or some version of it depending on the local dialect). Beijing existed as a capital in China with the Mongols in the 13th & 14th centuries. Original called Dadu 大都 (the great capital) and later Beiping 北平 (the English pronunciation Peiping) and later Beijing 北京 after 1949 (the English pronunciation Peking). The change from Peking to Beijing isn't considered a change by the Chinese. The 2 characters remain the same in Chinese. When the Chinese started using the Pinyin phonetic system in '49 for foreigners learning the language that they corrected the name that was mis-pronunce by the English to the proper pronunciation. Hong Kong after the 1997 handover to China continue to use the English version of the name although the Chinese pinyin would be Xianggang. And the neighbouring Macau continue using the Portuguese version of the name after the 1999 handover although the Chinese Pinyin would be Aomen. A lot of city names got changed after The War (WWII) for 1 very obvious reason. In the 19th century the Europeans colonized much of the world and used Western sounding names for places they administer and many were later changed to reflect local languages & pronunciations. Names in Africa like Rhodesia, Southern Rhodesia became Botswana, Zimbabwe. In Asia countries like Netherlands (Dutch) Indies became Indonesia, Cambodia became Kampuchea. Cities like Bombay changed to Mumbai, Madras to Chennai, Batavia in Indonesia to Jakarta.
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| Ari Heptaglot Senior Member Norway Joined 6590 days ago 2314 posts - 5695 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Mandarin, Cantonese Studies: Czech, Latin, German | Message 186 of 192 28 September 2012 at 7:24am | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||
That's probably because it wasn't loaned into English from Japanese. In Cantonese (and probably your heritage language Toishanese) it's pronounced "Jat bun" which sounds quite similar to "Japan". My guess is it was loaned into English through contact with Cantonese speakers.
Although if you'd want to model it on the local name surely we should use the Shanghainese pronunciation? Anyone know what that is?
Actually it was loaned into English from a Portugese transcription of the name for the province Gwong zau / Guangzhou, I'm guessing from Mandarin.
I think it's really weird. How can the Chinese change the way the city is called in English? I personally prefer Peking. It's a name with its own history and changing it to make it collocate with pinyin makes no sense to me. I like how people can go "How come it's called 'Peking' which doesn't sound like the Mandarin name?" And then they go and learn about Chinese postal map romanization. Also, the old system respected the linguistic diversity of China and romanized many places according to the local language, like Amoy (from Minnanese) rather than Xiamen (from Mandarin).
It's "Hoeng Gong" in Cantonese, where the English name comes from. Let's hope they don't change that one, too!
It's sort of a nice sentiment, I guess, and for the countries with English as a native language, it makes sense for them to decide what they call the place in English. But it's pretty strange. Could Sweden decide to change its name in Chinese? Is the name of a place in foreign languages decided by the people who live there (or rather, as in the case of China, by the people who live in the nation's capital)? To me it's not self-evident. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||||||||
| Марк Senior Member Russian Federation Joined 5064 days ago 2096 posts - 2972 votes Speaks: Russian* | Message 187 of 192 28 September 2012 at 10:09am | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||
Russian stressed и is English long “i”. English short “i” is somewhere between Russian и and ы. Russian и is even more “i” than the English one, because it follows a palatalized consonant. I know that from my personal experience and experience of other people. The example of an English loan-word in Japanese shows another thing. They accommodate the English sound image of the word to their own phonology and write it in such a way that anyone can pronounce it in that fashion. But what often happens in English? They just take a foreign word, remove all the diacritics and non-English letters or transliterate in a strange manner ( as "u" and so on) and then pronounce it in a random way. And actually those who read cannot have an idea how to pronounce it. If you take a German word, you can easily change w into v and v into f. But English just takes a word in the original form and then… read it as you want. Montevideo, as far as I know, was Monte VI de O. originally, which meant “the sixth mountain from the West”, but someone read it as one word. The same happens here: One writes something bearing in mind one thing, while another reads it according to different rules. Edited by Марк on 28 September 2012 at 1:09pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||||||||
| Josquin Heptaglot Senior Member Germany Joined 4852 days ago 2266 posts - 3992 votes Speaks: German*, English, French, Latin, Italian, Russian, Swedish Studies: Japanese, Irish, Portuguese, Persian | Message 188 of 192 28 September 2012 at 10:57am | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||
This is a misunderstanding. With "long i" I meant the long version of the grapheme i, i.e. the diphthong [aı]. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||||||||
| tarvos Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member China likeapolyglot.wordpr Joined 4715 days ago 5310 posts - 9399 votes Speaks: Dutch*, English, Swedish, French, Russian, German, Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Afrikaans Studies: Greek, Modern Hebrew, Spanish, Portuguese, Czech, Korean, Esperanto, Finnish | Message 189 of 192 28 September 2012 at 11:00am | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||
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It's ok. Mark is just very particular about phonology, the rest of us have moved on and
accepted English just does it the English way. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||||||||
| Марк Senior Member Russian Federation Joined 5064 days ago 2096 posts - 2972 votes Speaks: Russian* | Message 190 of 192 28 September 2012 at 12:38pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||
In fact, they used to be pronounced like that in Middle English. So, "I" was pronounced [i:], "foot" [fo:t] and feet [fe:t]. But then the pronunciation of vowels changed but the spelling remained unchanged. The French orthography has influenced too. Edited by Марк on 28 September 2012 at 12:38pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||||||||
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6605 days ago 9753 posts - 15779 votes 4 sounds Speaks: Russian*, English, FinnishC1, Latin, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Danish, Romanian, Polish, Belarusian, Ukrainian, Croatian, Slovenian, Catalan, Czech, Galician, Dutch, Swedish | Message 191 of 192 28 September 2012 at 1:06pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||
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I know:) Why change the names of letters though, if in other cases they're still pronounced like that? IMO the exceptions are treated as if they were the rule.
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| Марк Senior Member Russian Federation Joined 5064 days ago 2096 posts - 2972 votes Speaks: Russian* | Message 192 of 192 28 September 2012 at 1:07pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||
The names of letters are words which undergo the same phonetic processes as all the other words. Edited by Марк on 28 September 2012 at 1:38pm 2 persons have voted this message useful |
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