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.

  • Zizzy@lemmy.blahaj.zone
    172·
    3 days ago

    But I wouldn’t call someone named Frieda as Catherine. The disconnect for me comes when involving proper nouns. I understand on a historical level roughly how these came to be, but common decency tells me that I should call a proper noun by its proper name, but that isnt really true.

    • Yaky@slrpnk.net
      6·
      2 days ago

      But you would call Alexander or Alexandra “Sasha” or even “Shura” in some Slavic languages. And you call Robert “Bob” in the US.

      On the same topic, are “Alexander”, “Aleksandr” and “Oleksandr” the same name or not? What about “John” and “Ivan”?

    • bionicjoey@lemmy.ca
      292·
      3 days ago

      I work with French people who call me Jos instead of Joe. My girlfriend calls me 周 (Zhou) when we text each other. I’m fine with all of them as they all map to the same conceptual name.

      My name isn’t how it’s spelled, it’s the concept of “Joe”. As long as they are calling me the thing that maps to that name, I’m happy. Their brain has its own mapping between language and concepts which is distinct from mine.