Someone’s actually developed a “Real Map” of Europe, using the names that the countries call themselves as the country names, rather than the Anglicized version of it.
It’s an interesting exercise, though I disagree that the “normal” maps are a “ridiculous … last vestige of colonialism.”
(via BoingBoing)
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Colonialism? Maybe if we were talking about Africa. But it is the colony (namely the U.S.) that is naming the colonizers. Sounds like fair play to me. It was Deutchland that got us confused and called Germans Pennsylvania Dutch. At least we are not as bad as the British. I heard a BBC reporter from Managua, Nicaragua pronounce the a’s with the a in bad not ah.
The Brits are notorious for pronouncing foreign places (and foods, and the like) more idiosyncratically than the Americans — even when the word came to us through them.
Was about contries like China are we to learn the characters for PRC? Or all of the Arabic countries?
Well, heck, if we can work out the Greek and Russian, I’m sure we can come up with agreeable Chinese and Arabic.
Or not.
I imagine it would be one thing if the government of the Ukraine, or Greece, or Ireland, or Finland, formally asked us (or the UN) to officially refer to their countries by a changed name. Though, even there, I’m not quite ready to call Burma under its new name of Myanmar. Unless there’s something actually offensive about a name (“You do know that means ‘The Ugly Folks Who Live Across the River’ in our native tongue, don’t you?”), there doesn’t seem to be much point to it.
For that matter, isn’t doing something like this tantamount to favoring the name used by the dominant ethnic or language group in a country?
Take India, for example. Besides the widespread use of English, “Hindi is the national language and primary tongue of 30% of the people; there are 14 other official languages: Bengali, Telugu, Marathi, Tamil, Urdu, Gujarati, Malayalam, Kannada, Oriya, Punjabi, Assamese, Kashmiri, Sindhi, and Sanskrit; Hindustani is a popular variant of Hindi/Urdu spoken widely throughout northern India but is not an official language.”
“Bharat” is the name of India in Hindi — but do all the other groups use that name, too? And since the government, in English, refers to the country as India, why should anyone else care?
Similarly, the Japanese don’t seem to have a problem with calling their country Japan when speaking English, even if they use the name “Nihon.”
Maybe we should all standardize on the ISO country codes, and leave it at that. Or else leave out any vestige of English colonialism and go for the UN numeric codes.
Heck, we can’t even agree on what to call the people who lived here before us! Indians, Red Indians, Amerindians, Native Americans, Indigenous Peoples…
And what about non-names? Crippled, handicapped, physically challenged, differently abled…
No matter what we call somebody, there’s sure to be somebody else who thinks they should be offended by it. We’ll never get a concensus.
(Now, am I a geek, nerd, or dweeb?)
The correct term in Canada, at least, for the American aborigines is First People or First Nations. Not sure how that reduces down to individuals.