The substitution of well known English geographic names for foreign names strikes me as folly. Sowing confusion for no purpose is always a mistake.
Burn of the Day
- Donald R. McClarey
Donald R. McClarey
Cradle Catholic. Active in the pro-life movement since 1973. Father of three, one in Heaven, and happily married for 43 years. Small town lawyer and amateur historian. Former president of the board of directors of the local crisis pregnancy center for a decade.
“Sowing confusion for no purpose is always a mistake.“
Yes, but it’s no mistake. It’s meant. Purposeless but for one reason, confusion itself.
Coming from families with long ethnic names, I am sympathetic to some extent to the burned individual, but it’s definitely different when dealing with people as opposed to locations. Having a standardized name in your own language is helpful in study. So as far as I’m concerned, it’s Kiev, Prague, Rome, etc.
Remember when the Winter Olympics were held in Turin? Nope, it was always “Torino” this and “Torino” that. I do hope to go visit the “Shroud of Torino” sometime 😂😎
It’s interesting how personal names used to be translated into the native language, or Latin, as well. I’ll grant a waiver for Kyiv in terms of not being irritated by it, but I’d never think to use it.
Robert Graves used the modern English names for ancient Roman cities in “I, Claudius.” His reasoning was that they would be more familiar to modern audiences. In my case, he was spot on. I was a teenager when I first read it, and was more familiar with modern French cities because of my interest in WWI as a teenager.
It’s a self-aggrandizing maneuver, a small item in the call-out culture generally.
It’s Chicken Kyiv, not Chicken Kiev. But that would make the French-trained Russians who invented it pretty mad.
None of the people insisting that you say “Kyiv” would care about correctly pronouncing American cities like Ely MN, Pierre SD or Makinac Island MI.
Something else to note:
“Nipponese” used to be a common term in English for the Japanese. As “Nippon” is a native reading for 日本, this is in fact a more “accurate” term for them. But not only does no one advocate for bringing this term back, there are many people online who think that it is a slur, somehow. I’ve never seen an explanation for this other than “it sounds like something people would have said in the past, therefore it’s racist” or “it can be shortened to a slur” (but so can Japanese!)
That’s not without getting into how the French pronunciation of Paris has effectively died in English (despite being used frequently in old media), how no one says we should call it the Merchant of Venezia, etc., etc., etc.
True. That’s also one of the reasons the Gulf of Mexico is still “the Gulf of Mexico.”
The English speakers who say Rome instead of Roma or Leghorn instead of Livorno never tried to conquer and annihilate the Italian people as the Russians are trying to do to the Ukrainians. The Russian (and Russophile) use “Kiev” vs “Kyiv” has an unfortunate baggage it might not have in ordinary times. As when the Nazis changed the name of occupied France from Republique Francais to Etat Francais (translating directly the German Frankreich), it’s a way of saying, “We define you and own you by using our word for you”.
OK. So your problem is with English speakers saying “Japan” after firebombing and atom bombing Nippon. Got it.
It could be much worse. I heard quite a lot of “Keev” when this whole mess began. They couldn’t be bothered with “Kee-ehv”.
And in reverse, the French name for USA is Etats Unis and for England Angleterre