Re: Beijing, Zhongguo, etc.

Quoting Lars Finsen <lars.finsen@...>:

[snip]
> Anyway, I'm not trying to put you or the cultures and traditions of
> the whole English-speaking world down. You belong up there. I just
> thought it couldn't hurt if I told you, as a friend, how this
> attitude to foreign names comes across to the outside - especially as
> there are so many here now defending it.
I feel compelled to point out that not all outsiders feel like this -  I prefer
anglophones to use traditional English name-forms where they exist rather than
attempting to approximate the native names, and generally do so myself when
speaking English. If you say _Sverige_ or _Göteborg_ when speaking English, I'll
think you pretentious and silly. (Assuming, of course, you're talking about the
country or city, not Swedish pronunciation of whatever.)

[snip]

> Anyhow, I guess Georgia, the country, is known as Georgia in just
> about every language in the world.
A brief perusual of Wikipedia suggests most languages written in alphabets I can
read uses some variant of "Georgia", "Gruziya" (concentrated in eastern Europe),
or "Gurjistan" (SW Asia, mostly). From the somewhat confused discussion in the
article it's unclear to me whether any of those three are known to be related.
Apparent variants of "(Sa)Kartvelo" are found here and there.



--
Andreas Johansson