Note: for any future commotion, this was supposed to be purely educational. Okay the question should be why do countries have to do this and why is it so hard not to? Wouldn’t it make sense to add this to the list of things the youth can learn at an early age?
Why can’t they just allow kids in schools to learn the true names of things no matter how hard they may be to pronounce? I understand the difficulty but computers and the Internet exist so we can translate and better implement this. Like some words in English where we have no single word translation like ‘Dejavu’ (pardon non autocorrect), I understand. But places were changed to make it easier to produce in a native tongue. I am sure it is not only America, or English, but wouldn’t we be better off respecting the culture and not changing the name, like we changed our map to the correct pronunciation of Turkey (Türkiye). So why don’t we change everything back to how the countries’ place names are pronounced by their citizens out of respect? We can learn how to pronounce things better. Would it make things harder or would it allow us to grow? I am genuinely curious.
Note: I understand some people won’t be able to pronounce them but why did they decide it would be better for a country/language than to just try to pronounce them correctly.
Okay the question should be why do countries have to do this and why is it so hard not to?
How would you prevent it? Spanish has an international committee who’s job is to define correct Spanish and they haven’t be able to do anything about regional accents. France has a similar thing for French (AFAIK Quebec isn’t part of it), and they often end up failing in their fight to keep french pure.
Quebec has its own language authority which I believe does have some coordination with the one in France. Quebecois French diverged from France hundreds of years ago though and so uses different phrases and words that sound weird to French people and vice versa.
Sometimes languages have sounds that are hard to pronounce in other languages.
Also sometimes we came up with a name for a place based on imperfect information and the name caught on and stuck before we learned there was a better name we could be using.
How else would they do it? Check with other countries before evolving a word?
Ukraine had a “Kyiv not Kiev” campaign, which is more or less a request to do exactly what the post is asking about, call a place by how it sounds in its native language. But I am fairly certain it is still Kiev, Kiyev, and a variation of that in many other places, and the country is still called Ukraine in English, and not Ukraïna.
No, I meant with what word the country wants to be referred as. Then, use those words as in Türkiye in America. Of course it was out of respect and agreement but it is a fantastic idea and it is just about the names. And countries might be left not changed because they don’t care or it is too hard to pronounce. But there could be a teaching of pronunciation rather than spelling.
See, that’s the thing, most countries don’t care. If they did, they’d request the international community refer to them as something else. But they don’t, so they don’t. This is a non-issue.