Stupid Transliteration

[Have At You]

This is a great site, for good pronunciation of foreign names:

http://names.voa.gov/DailyAction.cfm


But it makes me wonder. You take someone from another country, with a different language and a different way of writing, and write their name in English. You can spell it any way you want, because you're transliterating it into English. And instead of spelling it the way it sounds, they go and spell it some way so it reads very different from the way it sounds.

Why do that? Why on earth don't they transliterate foreign words so they actually sound the way they're spelled?

[Go? Fencing?]

Furthermore, why can't we use the names for countries, cities, etc. that the people who live there use? We shouldn't have to have all the translation of place names.

[Have At You]

Yeah!

Instead of spelling it "moss-cow" and having newscasters inexplicably pronounce it "moss-koe", why not just go with "moskva"?

And doytch-land, instead of germany

And pa-whee instead of paris

and toe-kyoh instad of toe-kee-oh

and ee-ron instead of eye-ran

et freaking cetera

[keith]

.........and lets not forget poor old Suomi.

[Black Jeebus]

Well for one thing after a certain point people have an extremely difficult time learning new sounds. And a lot of the place names throughout the world have sounds in them that English speaking people don't use/know. And thus just like people who learn to speak English but never learn to pronounce some of the odd ball sounds we use ("th" for instance), there are some sounds that no matter how closely we approximate will never come out just right, that is why we use names other than the local names.

[Go? Fencing?]

But what about the ones we can pronounce? Surely we don't have to have different names for everything, or almost everything.

[Robert Smith]

...but what do you then about Moscow, Idaho? And Delhi, Ontario; Belgrade, Montana; Corsica, South Dakota; Italy, Texas?

[Have At You]

Smith: You'd just leave them alone. They don't have the same pronunciation problems.


But come on. Why do we say "Florence" instead of fear-EN-zay?

Why do we spell nip-pon "Japan"?

Why do we spell gair-hart shray-der so you'd pronounce it jerrard shrow-der?

Why do we spell kah-roll voy-tih-wah so you'd pronounce it Carol Wodge Tye-la?

[Black Jeebus]

Those just have historical momentum. Along the same lines why don't other languages call English places/names by their English equivalent. Last time I checked the word for the language wasn't Ingles (just like the Spanish language is actually Espanol).

[Zilverzmurfen]

...and lets not forget poor old Suomi.

...or Sverige...

[swordwench]

When one set of my grandparents came through Ellis Island, it seems the officials at the desk couldn't figure out what to do with their last name (having one of those foreign-looking marks on the c and all). So they spelled it the way they thought they heard it (my grandparents speaking little to no English at the time in order to help them), and consequently the spelling of our surname was changed.

Over time, half of our family also changed the pronunciation of the name to make it less troublesome to deal with. Since everyone was mispronouncing it anyway, it was easier to take the path of least resistance and say it the way most people ended up saying it. Strange. I myself did this my first day of college. I met my roommate, who was all proud of herself for having figured out how to pronounce it on her own. (It was incorrect.) After years of fighting it and correcting people, I just waved my hand, said "Yeah, sure, we'll say it that way now" and it's been that way ever since. And anyone who mangles it just gets the comment "Close enough!"

[mrbiggs]

Yeah!

Instead of spelling it "moss-cow" and having newscasters inexplicably pronounce it "moss-koe", why not just go with "moskva"?

And doytch-land, instead of germany

And pa-whee instead of paris

and toe-kyoh instad of toe-kee-oh

and ee-ron instead of eye-ran

et freaking cetera

Worst one ever:

WAR-SAW instead of var-shav-ah

First, they sound nothing alike. Second, varshava is a very pretty name, whereas Warsaw really isn't. Third, we can get alot closer to the Polish pronunciation than Warsaw.



Of course, then you have China, where the English names and Chinese names sometimes have nothing in common at all. (Canton, for example.)