Re: Beijing, Zhongguo, etc.

On Wed, Aug 20, 2008 at 12:01 PM, Eugene Oh <un.doing@...> wrote:

> know Norwegian). It's not about English pronunciations. Tell the Japanese,
> who say [4osandzerMsM] (L.A.), or [herMSinki] (Helsinki, approximately),
> and, like Henrik pointed out, get referred to as Japan, Geppun, Rìběn, Ilbon
> all over the world but not Nihon. Or should we get around to talking about
> Ellada and Bharat, or Misr?
I agree with you and Mark about use of names adapted to the target
languages' phonology, especially when they're long established
by tradition.   In auxlangs and engelangs, though, I tend to favor
adapting names
from the native form even if a different form is more more
widespread internationally.  In Esperanto I think I hear "Baratio" a little
more often than "Hindio" and "Suomio" almost as often as "Finnlando";
similarly I usually use names adapted from the native languages to
gzb phonology for {nihoŋ-wam, ejr-wam, bharat-wam}.   (The phonotactic
rules are relaxed vis-a-vis foreign names, at least w.r.t. spelling, maybe
not quite as much w.r.t pronunciation.)   For multilingual countries
I haven't got a consistent solution yet; Switzerland is {helwetika-wam},
from the Latin name of the country, Confederatio Helvetica.
A few country names (and a couple of conlang names) are translated
calques of the name's original meaning, e.g. {lîpur-wam} "Spain",
lit. "lagomorph-country" from Phoenician 'i-shephan-im'.  The U.S.A. has
inconsistently been {usa-wam} or more often {usonia-wam}.

--
Jim Henry
http://www.pobox.com/~jimhenry/conlang/fluency-survey.html
Conlang fluency survey -- there's still time to participate before
I analyze the results and write the article