Why isn't Spain called Espanya?

May 18, 2010 1:49 PM

Why do we rename countries in our native language?

For example, why do we call it Spain? It's España to them, but we could just as easily call it Espana or Espanya. Same with Japan and Nihon/Nippon, and probably a fair amount of other countries. (However, we don't seem to rename cities; we just change the pronunciation to fit our language.)

Why do we or have we done this, and is this only an English-language phenomenon? If anyone has examples from other languages, or counter-examples, I'd be interested in those, too.

Finally, if I'm totally wrong about this and I'm only citing the rare exception, tell me!

Thanks, MeFi!

posted by reductiondesign to Society & Culture (40 answers total)

However, we don't seem to rename cities

Some cities do get renamed, or at least spelled differently; Cologne and Köln are the same place, for example.

As to the main part of your question, I have no idea, but it's something I've often wondered myself, especially since the names are often so different (Japan vs. Nihon and Germany vs. Deutschland).
posted by infinitywaltz at 1:51 PM on May 18, 2010

Couple of examples of cities that immediately spring to mind...

London (English) = Londres (French)
Munchen (German) = Munich (English)
posted by saintsguy at 1:52 PM on May 18, 2010

It's not at all an Anglophone phenomenon. The French, for example call the United States "Les États-Unis."
posted by oinopaponton at 1:52 PM on May 18, 2010

Angleterre, Ecosse, l'Australie, l'Allemand ... no, it's not just an English-language phenomenon. I think the name of a country is just a word, and the name of someone else's country in my language is no more and no less a word.
posted by Logophiliac at 1:54 PM on May 18, 2010 [1 favorite]

However, we don't seem to rename cities

Firenze/Florence, Köln/Cologne, München/Munich, Baile Átha Cliath/Dublin, shall I go on?
posted by DevilsAdvocate at 1:55 PM on May 18, 2010

Why do we rename countries in our native language?

I'm not sure of the underlying linguistic reasons why particular country names stick, or if it's a particularly English thing, but for specific etymologies of country names Wikipedia has a nice page detailing a bunch.
posted by burnmp3s at 1:56 PM on May 18, 2010 [1 favorite]

I agree with the others, here's more examples:
The United States (English)= Los Estados Unidos (Spanish)
The United States (English)= Gli Stati Uniti (Italian)

Duetschland (German) = Germany (English)
Duetschland (German) = Alamania (Spanish)
posted by deinemutti at 1:57 PM on May 18, 2010

It's common to translate names into one's native language. Check out Wikipedia's listing of country names in various languages. Many are just phonetic transliterations, but not all.
posted by desuetude at 1:58 PM on May 18, 2010

Previously
posted by Adam_S at 1:59 PM on May 18, 2010

It's not English-only, I know for example that many countries have altered names in Japanese--some of this is history, some of this is because it's just hard or impossible to pronounce the name properly as it sounds in the language of that country. I think this would have to be looked at on a case-by-case basis. Here's the etymology entry for Spain in wikipedia, to specifically answer (as best as wikipedia can) your question regarding Spain...
posted by dubitable at 2:04 PM on May 18, 2010

The name "The United States" is made up of words that actually exist independently in other languages, so the relationship between it and "Estados Unidos", for example, is more easily grasped than, say, Deutschland/Germany.
posted by anazgnos at 2:05 PM on May 18, 2010 [2 favorites]

In Mandarin, the US is Mei3Guo2, literally translated would be "Beautiful Country." Most other countries I can think of though are at least something vaguely resembling an attempt at phonetic transliteration, though often that involves taking the first sound and adding "guo2". France = Fa3Guo2, Germany (Deutschland) = De2Guo2, etc.
posted by kmz at 2:08 PM on May 18, 2010

Well, we even translate personal names into our own languages, or we used to, as you'll realize if you know anyone name Мария/Maria/Mary, Hamish/Jaime/James, or Juan/Johan/John.

It does seem decreasingly common, as some combination of political correctness and globalization is influencing a sort of linguistic relativism, and both personal and place names are increasingly just left in their native language as-is.

This is progress, I suppose, though I still wish contemporary newscasters wouldn't drop into that drunken Latinesque thing they do whenever they need to say anything from "Rodriguez" to "repertoire."
posted by rokusan at 2:10 PM on May 18, 2010

Sometimes the spelling doesn't change but the pronunciation does so France with a short a (like Fonz) becomes France with a long a (like pants). The exception is countries and cities from Spanish speaking countries in which the Spanish pronunciation is almost always used (at least in America)
posted by Bonzai at 2:10 PM on May 18, 2010

The Straight Dope explained what's up with Germany a few years back.

Anyway, this doesn't just happen with country and city names. First names, especially the names of saints, get altered too: John/Jean/Giovanni/Juan/Jan/Johannes/Sean and so on.

Quite often when we use a foreign name it gets converted to our own local pronunciation. I've met a couple of American guys named Giovanni who pronounced it "Gee oh van nee" instead of "Joe van nee."
posted by hydrophonic at 2:14 PM on May 18, 2010

It's generally a mixture of historical and linguistic slippiness and stickiness -- a game of cultural telephone -- and it's generally found where there's a long history of encounters between speakers of that language with the country in question. 'Japan' goes back to the days of Marco Polo, as an approximation of what the non-Japanese peoples on the SE Asian trade routes called the place. Occasionally, it's a descriptive term of the funny foreigners that happens to stick.

(A good example: the many names of the Greeks.)

Newer nation states tend to be called by the names they choose, with the odd modification to fit established language rules, but there's still a degree of stickiness (e.g. what Daniel Davies calls the Imperialist Definite Article) that can sometimes cause offence.
posted by holgate at 2:14 PM on May 18, 2010

In the past, it was common to translate not just place names, but people's names into one's native language. For example, a couple Genoan explorers named Cristoforo Colombo and Giovanni Caboto became became Christopher Columbus and John Cabot. Many Biblical and saints' names got "localized" as well.

(on preview, what hydrophonic said)
posted by zsazsa at 2:16 PM on May 18, 2010

Using The United States as an example of a country whose name gets changed in foreign languages doesn't really serve as a good example since our country's name is basically words that other languages have. That's why we call it the United States, and in spanish it is referred to as the States United (Estados Unidos). Those are just common words said natively. But let's imagine our country was named Jeffersonia. Would it get changed in other languages?
posted by 2oh1 at 2:19 PM on May 18, 2010

Of course there's also lots of politics involved in cases like Peking/Beijing, Bombay/Mumbai, etc.

One thing I've always found interesting is that the official English name of Beida is still Peking University. And of course there's Beijing Kaoya, aka Peking Duck.

Mmm, Peking Duck.
posted by kmz at 2:19 PM on May 18, 2010 [1 favorite]

The two are called endonyms and exonyms, the former being what natives call a place and the latter being what outsiders call it.

So England is the endonym and Angleterre is the French exonym.

Now, as for why we create new names for countries, I would assume that history and colonization play a part in it. For example, anyone from Canada has seen the Heritage Minute commercial in which Jacques Cartier first encounters native people. An older native is pointing towards a group of houses and saying "Ca-na-da." Cartier thinks that's what the name of the land is et voila, Canada is the name given the land by outsiders.

Another example of an exonymic naming of a country comes from Wikipedia's entry on the names of China:

From Sanskrit Cin (चीन IPA: /c͡çiːnə/). The traditional theory, proposed in the 17th century by Martin Martini, is that the word is derived from "Qin Dynasty" (秦), which ruled China in 221 – 206 BC. Despite the fact that the word was used earlier, both in Laws of Manu (2nd century BC) and in the Mahabhārata (5th century BC), this is still the most widely accepted theory.

Marco Polo described China specifically as Chin, which is the word used in Persian, the main lingua franca on his route through the Silk Road. Barbosa (1516) and Garcia de Orta (1563) mentioned China.

I would assume that most other place names have similar origins.
posted by fso at 2:20 PM on May 18, 2010 [5 favorites]

The same is also present in Arabic. Germany becomes Almaniya (borrowing from other European languages in how they refer to it). Britain, the US and the UN as entities also go for the literal translation into Arabic.

Other examples:

Arabic: Al-Maghreb
English: Morocco
Arabic: Msr
English: Egypt
Arabic: Al-Urdun
English: Jordan

If memory serves, either Austria or Switzerland also has an odd name in Arabic, like An-Nimsah, though I don't often discuss either in Arabic so yeah... definitely not something strictly limited to English. I think all languages must do it in order to produce a sound that is more pleasing to their own ear. For example, in English we have no words that have that Latin/Romance slant like Espanya, the very word sounds foreign. Hence, Spain. I also heard that during WWI, a lot of towns were regularly renamed for simplicity's sake. Ypres, for example, was referred to the by the British Forces as Wipers.
posted by Biru at 2:29 PM on May 18, 2010

In languages with case declension, not changing the name of the country would be difficult, especially if there are specific rules to follow for what nouns look like in certain places in sentences. In Polish, "Lithuania" can be Litwa, Litwie, Litwy, Litwę, Litwą, and Litwo depending on how it's being used.

"Litwa" is what appears on a globe, but in this sentence from Polish Wikipedia you can see the change:

By zostać prezydentem Litwy trzeba mieć ukończone 40 lat i co najmniej od 3 lat mieszkać na terytorium państwa...

(In order to become president of Lithuania one needs to be at least 40 years old and have lived in the country for at least 3 years...)

However, while in English we say Rome and not Roma, and Moscow and not Moskva, we absolutely keep a huge majority of other cities as they sound (mostly) to their own inhabitants: Jakarta, Quito, Tallinn, etc. I'm not sure why this happens, but perhaps the earlier the place was known to the English, the more time it has had to anglicize.
posted by mdonley at 2:32 PM on May 18, 2010

For some reason, the names of Italian cities seem especially prone to bastardization in English. Torino=Turin, Milano=Milan, etc. Livorno was sometimes called Leghorn (!). Can't figure out why—they're not harder to pronounce than, say, Spanish cities, but we don't call Santiago "St James" or Barcelona "Barcalounger."

Korea's name in Korean is Hanguk. We got our word for it via Persian traders, who got their name from one ancient kingdom in Korea. Japan and Nippon, strangely enough, derive from the same word in Middle Japanese (I think). There have been phonetic changes on both sides though.

Going into Japanese, that language's limited phonetic system means that a lot of country names need to change just to fit the consonant-vowel pattern in Japanese. America becomes "Amerika," so that survives intact, but England becomes "Igirisu." Plus they all get Sinified names in Japanese, so that the USA becomes 米国 ("beikoku," rice country) and the UK becomes 英国 ("eikoku", brilliant country).
posted by adamrice at 2:42 PM on May 18, 2010

I think that Nippon and Japan are just different transliterations of the same word in Japanese (the latter without the Italian influence), and nether would really fly in a language course. Same is true with Peking and Beijing.

And people (not just English speakers) do it with cities just as often as with countries. In English Rome, Moscow, Berlin, Vienna, Mexico City are a few that aren't close to the native pronunciation.

But in many cases, Germany, Spain, Italy, the English name is a lot older than the country they represent. Yet, we use The Netherlands, which isn't that far off, but have a different name for the people who live there and an alternative (less a curate) name for the place too. I wonder why.
posted by Some1 at 2:46 PM on May 18, 2010 [1 favorite]

Or, sometimes people incorrectly think their own place-name is foreign, and change the spelling to suit.
posted by kiltedtaco at 2:46 PM on May 18, 2010

However, we don't seem to rename cities

Yeah we do. Rome is Roma in Italian. Paris is Paris (pronounced paREE) in French. Wouldn't it be weird if Italians went around talking about "Naples"? It's "Napoli" in Italian. And so on ad inf.

is this only an English-language phenomenon? If anyone has examples from other languages, or counter-examples, I'd be interested in those, too.

Well, the two foreign languages I've studied are French and Italian. Country names were things we had to learn just like any other vocabulary words. Surely you don't think everyone else calls our country "the United States," do you?
posted by Jaltcoh at 3:45 PM on May 18, 2010

we absolutely keep a huge majority of other cities as they sound (mostly) to their own inhabitants: Jakarta, Quito, Tallinn, etc.

Except that Jakarta was 'Batavia' for most of the past 400 years.

Yet, we use The Netherlands, which isn't that far off, but have a different name for the people who live there and an alternative (less a curate) name for the place too. I wonder why.

That bit of Europe has been lots of things over the past 500 years. (The exonyms associated with Europe's two big late unifiers, Germany and Italy, reflect a similar patter of component parts with long, distinctive histories.)
posted by holgate at 3:46 PM on May 18, 2010

I'm not sure if this is strictly relevant, but there was a brief proposal by the founder of Esperanto to refer to countries by their main city instead of by these "ethnically" and "nationally" defined names.

So you would have "Berlin-Lando" for Germany, "Paris-Lando" for France, so on and so forth. This never really caught on (a good thing, probably, because imagine how much it would have pissed off the people in Marseilles and Münich).

Today the Esperanto convention seems to be roughly "take the English equivalent and add an -io/-ujo or an -o or maybe a -lando"--Germany is Germanio/Germanujo, France is Francio/Francujo, Japan is Japanio/Japanujo, the US is Usono, Russia is Ruslando. Someone from each of these countries is a Germano, a Franco, a Japano, an Usonano, and a Ruslandano.

What's up with the -io/-ujo? All of those country names were originally just -ujo, because the "-ujo" suffix in Esperanto means "container for," as in "sukerujo" for sugar bowl or "benzinujo" for gas tank, so saying "Germanujo" is like saying "container for Germanoj."

The non- "-io/-ujo" countries then have their residents designated as "Usonano" and "Ruslandano," where "-ano" is the suffix for "resident of," which means that for Germany, "Germano" is the original root, and you expand that to the country name "Germanujo," so the underlying logic is that the country is a container for Germans, but for the United States, "Usono" is the original root, and you expand that to the resident name "Usonano," so your underlying logic is that a US-ian is someone who lives in the United States.

What this means is that "-io/-ujo" countries are generally those conceived of as monoethnic, and other countries are those conceived of as polyethnic, although there are lots of exceptions and controversies--for example, I've seen Korea as both "Koreo" and "Koreio," and some of the people who have used "Koreio" clearly wanted me to be thinking of Koreans as an ethnic group.

(-ujo has moved to -io over the years because people are uncomfortable with the explicitness of the "container" thing, plus most European Esperantists (aka most Esperantists) are more comfortable with "-io" as an ending because it's more familiar to their tongues.)

The point of my story, I guess, is that you might expect the Esperantists of all people to say "Let's refer to every country by the name its inhabitants use!" but they don't. And they're actually mired in their own weird politicized arguments about a lot of country names.

So I don't expect any national language to handle this better.
posted by besonders at 3:48 PM on May 18, 2010 [3 favorites]

Somewhat related.... Because of an acquaintance with someone from Missouri, I've always been under the impression that natives of that state pronounce it "Mizzoorah" while citizens of other states refer to it as "Mizzoori." However, this article suggests that the majority of citizens of Missouri do indeed pronounce it ""Mizzoori"."
posted by Morrigan at 3:50 PM on May 18, 2010

The exception is countries and cities from Spanish speaking countries in which the Spanish pronunciation is almost always used (at least in America)

Mexico.
posted by ROU_Xenophobe at 3:53 PM on May 18, 2010

For some reason, the names of Italian cities seem especially prone to bastardization in English.

Perhaps because English/Germanic contact with the cities that are now Italian pre-dated the Italian language. It was Neápolis in Latin before it was Napoli.
posted by smackfu at 4:03 PM on May 18, 2010 [2 favorites]

Going along with the Japanese bit, while the name of the city or country needs to be altered to fit the Japanese syllables, the spirit of the name remains intact, hence Italian place names remain close to the actual Italian (the Japanese version copies Firenze, not Florence, Roma, not Rome, and so on), or, ferinstance, Wien instead of Vienna. The place where it just falls down is China, where all kanji are called by their Japanese equivalent (Peking instead of Beijing, for example), which is kind of touchy, at least among the Chinese people I've spoken to.
posted by Ghidorah at 4:22 PM on May 18, 2010

See also Please Select New City Name.
posted by tellumo at 5:48 PM on May 18, 2010

Torino is called Turin in English. I hated it when NBC insisted on calling it "Torino" during the Olympics.
posted by charlesv at 6:48 PM on May 18, 2010

There's a definite strange post/anti-colonial thing going on as well.

For example, it was always Peking. But now it's Beijing, and that's because the Chinese want it that way. And it's Mumbai not Bombay, Chennai not Madras, Kolkata not Calcutta. There's a lot of identity politics wrapped up in that.
posted by wilful at 7:26 PM on May 18, 2010

Because if everyone called countries the same, that would go against the whole idea of people speaking different languages.
posted by wongcorgi at 7:27 PM on May 18, 2010

The exception is countries and cities from Spanish speaking countries in which the Spanish pronunciation is almost always used (at least in America)

Mexico
República Dominicana, rather than Dominican Republic
Cuba (koo-ba, rather than cue-ba)
Puerto Rico (it's not Porto-Rico in Spanish)
posted by desuetude at 10:12 PM on May 18, 2010

It's not that people set out to name countries wrong. Names are just words, and like all words they have a long history and are subject to normal linguistic evolution.

Many of our geographical terms come from French-- after all, the medieval English had a lot more interaction with the French, as the closest country, than anyone else, and were conquered by Norman French in 1066. The medieval form of "Spain" was "Spaine" or "Spaigne", it was customary to lose the initial e- of such borrowings; compare spy / espier, standard / estandard, stay / ester. We can blame the French for losing the final -a, a normal process in French words derived from Latin. The [a:] sound changed to [e:] with the Great Vowel Shift. People generally skip sounds they can't pronounce; Middle English didn't have the French/Spanish ny sound and so changed it to n.

'Japan' comes from a Malay term 'Japaŋ', itself a representation of Chinese Rìběn (the initial sound can sound like j). The Middle Chinese would have been ńźjet puən; now you can see how this would be borrowed into Japanese as Nippon. Nihon is a more modern variant (it's another reading of the same character). Yes, Japan is named in Japanese using a Chinese word.

In cases where the name really doesn't match at all, there's usually a story behind that too. "Egypt", for instance, comes from a Greek name, originally a name for Memphis. The native name was "Kemet". Arabic "Misr" comes from an old Semitic word meaning "the borders"-- Egypt was at the borders of the Semitic lands.

And so on. Remember that most of these names were made in a world of slow communications, where you could hardly ask someone from that country; names could go through a long string of intermediaries.
posted by zompist at 2:54 AM on May 19, 2010 [2 favorites]

kmz: In Mandarin, the US is Mei3Guo2, literally translated would be "Beautiful Country." Most other countries I can think of though are at least something vaguely resembling an attempt at phonetic transliteration, though often that involves taking the first sound and adding "guo2". France = Fa3Guo2, Germany (Deutschland) = De2Guo2, etc.

美国 (Měigúo) is also a transliteration: "měi" is supposed to sound like the "me" in America. The full name for the American continent is 亚美利加洲 (Yàměilìjiāzhōu), after Amerigo Vespucci (亚美利哥·韦斯普奇). 法国 (Fǎgúo) and 德国 (Dégúo) are also abbreviations, for 法兰西共和国 and 德意志联邦共和国, respectively. The 共和国 part is "republic", but 法兰西 and 德意志 are straight transliterations of "France" and "Deutsch".
posted by jweed at 7:34 AM on May 19, 2010 [1 favorite]

Japan comes from the old Chinese pronunciation of the characters for nihon, which sounded to Portuguese ears as zhipang.
posted by KokuRyu at 10:37 PM on May 19, 2010 [1 favorite]