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Re: Beijing, Zhongguo, etc.

From:Jim Henry <jimhenry1973@...>
Date:Thursday, August 21, 2008, 14:18
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