Comments on: Foreign place names (1)

By: Dimka

Dimka — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 00:13:10 +0000

Anyway, i do like Beijing name, its more appealing, imho )

By: sandrar

sandrar — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 22:13:21 +0000

Hi! I was surfing and found your blog post… nice! I love your blog. Cheers! Sandra. R.

By: kevin

kevin — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 17:35:24 +0000

sharkbait:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uniform_Resource_Identifier
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uniform_Resource_Locator

By: Nigel Greenwood

Nigel Greenwood — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 14:52:36 +0000

Some Finnish exonyms seem a bit strange. Itävalta (”Eastern power”) for Austria is just a calque based on Österreich; but others — perhaps unsurprisingly, they refer to neighbouring countries — are less easy to guess. Ruotsi (Sweden) is, I believe, derived from the coastal region of Sweden called Roslagen (this resembles the English use of Holland for the Netherlands). But Venäjä (Russia) is rather more obscure: is it related to vehnä (wheat)? Almost uniquely among the names of countries in Finnish, Venäjä is inflected using the set of cases meaning “on” rather than those meaning “in”. So in Finnish you say Ruotsissa (in Sweden), but Venäjällä (”on” Russia).

By: syz

syz — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 00:25:05 +0000

Looking forward to a lively discussion. Don’t post without reading Grant Hutchison’s Himalaya/Himahlya piece, though :^)

http://bubl.ac.uk/org/tacit/tac/tac54/jaccuseh.htm

By: Sharkbait

Sharkbait — Wed, 19 Mar 2008 17:37:45 +0000

Interesting post. I can already see a few potential problems with the various approaches for place-naming, which likely have lead to the variations that already occur. Languages that don’t have similar sound inventories, and are strict about adopting new words/sounds, will reinterpret the foreign place name as is necessary to conform to the phonological rules of their language. It reminds me of how “Merry Christmas” in Hawaiian is interpreted as “Mele Kalikimaka”, which is just about as close as it can get without breaking some rules. Also, many of the foreign place names could be mistranslated, resulting in a folk-etymology-like situation (ex. “asparagus” in the US is “sparrow-grass” in England). And of course there’s all the sociolinguistic factors that will weigh heavily in the naming debates.

I think it’s pretty darn interesting stuff, and I will be looking forward to anything more you have to say on it.

(Also, just wondering, why does the box under “Leave a reply” say “URI” instead of “URL”?)

By: butcherpete

butcherpete — Wed, 19 Mar 2008 17:07:59 +0000

Regarding Greenland.

I believe that the ancestors of the modern Inuit were not in Greenland when the Norse arrived. I think there were other people there, but they were not the ancestors of today’s Greenlanders.

Also, what about “Leghorn” aka Livorno. What is the deal with that?