It's Leningrad, not St Petersburg... :deeper-sadness:
Ironically "Prussia" is where the whole thing breaks down the worst anyway, keeping the old name was worse.
The Old Prussians were eventually entirely culturally genocided by the northern crusades and later Germanization campaigns, but the Hohenzollerns always kept the name going because it being an extra-imperial territory meant they could declare themselves kings in it (then later, of it) and attached the name to a settler aristocracy with no connection to the Prussian people or language.
shit like this is so stupid. :lmayo: didn't name like, anything in asia.
Peking is not a western imperial name, its the chinese name, rendered in a way a 19th century british man thought a british person could approximate it
Ceylon is also a rendering of the native name, but through a long line of fucked up transmissions that made it well off target
Burma/Myanmar is the same name in different register they just formally changed it to win anti-imperial points during an unpopular government
Siam is a bit confusing but even if its a name from outside, its like from india, not British dudes
Persia is just very, very old native name---Fars was Pars in old persian, and in english its direct from latin whoch was already ancient when brits started using it. the issue with the name persia is the province/country distinction, Iran has long been not simply fars/pars or exclusively parsi/farsi. the name was switched in the notably imperial Reza Pahlavi's autocratic pro-british-pertroleum reign, but we all know its inclusion is a knock against the islamic republic, facts be damned
Bombay and Mumbai are again, the same word "Etymologists have wrongly derived this name from the Portuguese Bôa Bahia, or (French: "bonne bai", English: "good bay"), not knowing that the tutelar goddess of this island has been, from remote antiquity, Bomba, or Mumba Devi, and that she still ... possesses a temple"
Saigon GET OWNED YANKS :anglo-burn:
Constantinople was only officially renamed in the 1920s, to a different still greek name that was simply colloquial. 400 years the Turks didn't really give a shit, the change has more to do with getting rid of the Sultan & moving the capital to Ankara than showing it directly to westerners (Sultan was in the Brits' pocket kinda tho)
Rhodesia is the only name on this list that westerners actually invented and used---and then got owned :fash-bash:
BTW China 中国, Sri Lankaஇலங்கை, Myanmarပြည်ထောင်စု သမ္မတ မြန်မာနိုင်ငံတော်, Thailandราชอาณาจักรไทย , Iranجمهوری اسلامی ایران, Mumbaiमुंबई, AND Constantinople Κωνσταντινούπολις are ALL written in non-latin alphabets.
by rights there shouldn't be an 'official' spelling in english for any of their shit
Well, they've got historical connotations.
Chi-na is the nation of the Chi (Qi) Dynasty, for instance. The name is derived from when English speaking traders made first contact. In Mandarin, it would be Zhong Guo - literally "The Middle Country" - but that loses context from an outsider looking in.
These names are effectively historical artifacts that have persisted through repetition. Fighting over them is utterly pointless, as they'll all change again as time and culture demand.
Chi-na is the nation of the Chi (Qi) Dynasty, for instance.
You mean Qin. Qi was a ducal state during the Zhou dynasty that comprises of modern Shandong.
i changed it to be less confusing i was just trying to say the languages reflecting the names that were changed don't use anything like the english alphabet
Sure. But the sounds can be translated phonetically to roughly the same thing. Its just that the thing you're sounding out ("Qi"-na) is a abbreviated slang for "The Nation of the Qi Emperor". And that statement only has context relative to your local audience (mostly just 19th century sailors who speak your language).
Doggedly stomping your feet and demanding we change the names of things to an archaic throw-back is the picture of reactionary linguistics. If anything, we should be renaming countries with a more forward looking approach. I suggest we should rename the country "Maiden" because everything I own has "Made In China" stamped on it.
that statement only has context relative to your local audience
this is exactly it. whether 'Peking' or 'Beijing' produces the appropriate sounds for the word is contingent entirely on the english speaker's accent. revisions to that spelling based on changes to those accents or which english speakers are using the word more regularly is not a 'capitulation' to anti-imperial red China---english speakers were never trying to name the capital something else to disrespect them, we were just trying to say the fucking name! and why should the PRC care how we spell it, they don't speak english, but they will be confused if your words sound wrong---which was the exact opposite point of Wade-Giles, its just from the fucking 1850s
The meaning of the written symbol now is more than just a guide to phoneme production. Continued use of the 'Peking' spelling is typically used to reference pre-revolution China and British colonization.
I thought OP's bit was fairly illustrative.
But some Eton schooled dork insisting we call the capital of China "Peking" is purely backwards looking. It doesn't mean anything in the modern moment other than a reminder of English Chauvinism long since past its prime.
A progressive would signal to British People what Beijing is becoming.
the really orientalist ones would translate 中国 to middle kingdom instead of country
That seems a little unreasonable. The Chinese, Sri Lankans, etc all have spellings in their respective languages for western locations
english speakers wanting to be able to refer to locations is not unreasonable
spellings in their respective languages for western locations
well yes but nobody in the western location cares how those are 'spelled' so to speak, just if the spoken word is understandable. its a function of anglo imperialism that countries can get referred to with poor transliterations in world-dominating english media so often they feel the need to correct english speakers through diplomatic channels instead of case-to-case, as any normal person would a traveler
by rights there shouldn’t be an ‘official’ spelling in english for any of their shit
There should, or you'd just have many inconsistent spellings across the English language. The official spelling however should be determined by the people that actually speak the language, which is exactly what happened when Peking became Beijing. The PRC made their own romanization instead of using the one made by colonizers.
Peking is not a western imperial name, its the chinese name, rendered in a way a 19th century british man thought a british person could approximate it
I thought it was a regional dialect thing due to sound changes since it was originally named (IIRC that would have been "Peiping/Beiping" at the time and the consonant in the middle just shifted back in the mouth and diverged regionally into either j or k because languages just kind of do that sometimes). "Peking" is the southern pronunciation and what western traders encountered first, while "Beijing" is the northern pronunciation (so the pronunciation in and around Beijing itself).
When the Dalai Llama dies, the next Western darling will be some guy whose family had a monopoly on all the peas in China, the Pea King.
Now it's Istanbul, not Constantinople
Been a long time gone, oh Constantinople
Why did Constantinople get the works?
That's nobody's business but the TurksI got handed an Ayn Rand sandwich
Straight from a can it tasted so bland
I asked a lass to pass me a glass
Of Engel's Conditions of the Working Class
It was refounded as Nova Roma, so that's the most correct name
Thailand was never a colony, tf Brits trying to do telling them how to call their country
The joke is that somebody is banging his mom, whose name is Sarah, which is what the person banging his mom is calling her, because they are treating her as an individual person, and not an extension of him.
Sarah is just the first random name I came up with. It could have been Dannika or Marcy or whatever. If it was a cumtown style joke, it would have been.
"It's my dad, not Ron."
