Re: Myanmar (formerly Burma)

On May 11, 8:20=A0pm, "D.F. Manno" <dfma...@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
> In article
> <c5dccc5c-849c-4ff6-997b-0b62ab7ff...@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
>,
>
> =A0Veronique <veroniqueuni...@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
> > Part of the oddness for me is it is the English name for the country,
> > which sounds like of like Germany insisting us auslanders call it
> > Deutschland.
>
> Well, shouldn't we call it "Deutschland"? Why don't English speakers
> refer to certain countries by the names natives use, e.g., Espa=F1a,
> Italia, et al.? We don't call a certain Central American nation "The
> Savior," nor do we call a certain South American country "Equator."
>
> And we don't refer to the capital of a U.S. commonwealth as "Saint John,
> Rich ****t."

Why do we use the names we do, however inconsistent they might be?
Well, um..., it's complicated.  You have to look at the histories on a
nearly case by case basis.

With respect European countries, there are traditional English forms
which developed long before anyone even considered the idea of caring
about local sensitivities.  Nonetheless many of the results are pretty
close to the local name, with the form Anglicized a bit:
Italia>Italy.  In the case of Deutschland, with its lack of obvious
connection with "Germany", this goes back at least to Tacitus.  The
Romans did the same thing with the Hellenes, picking a semi-random sub-
group and applying its name to everybody.  Modern English has never
bothered to fix this.

As for those Latin American places they had established names before
any Anglophones thought about the question, and Spanish names work
reasonably well with English phonetics, so they just went with more-or-
less Spanish.  Compare this with China or Japan, where there were
established local names but the phonetics did not mess comfortably
with English, so the result was a seriously butchered version of the
local name.

Richard R. Hershberger