anglicisation=cultural imperialism?

[cimorene]

psa: the delightful snacky has been running a snackfood deathmatch.  it's almost time for the semi-finals!  at last!

wax just pointed out that when we go to paris and munich this summer, i will have to find something to do with the dog, which is problematic when you're anti-social and hardly know anyone.  that hadn't even occurred to me yet.

speaking of munich, i didn't know until very recently that that's an anglicisation of its proper german name, münchen. this prompted a bit of indignance on my part, because i find the whole practice of renaming foreign cities irritating and unnecessarily confusing. it's one thing for finns to call london "lontoo" because the proper way would break their language's rules of pronunciation: the effect is the same as just reading the name with a strong accent, and most people have a ridiculously hard time with pronouncing foreign words. it's another thing entirely when english is changing "münchen" for "munich" or "torino" for "turin", because neither of the originals is difficult to approximate in english. i'm also puzzled about how many of these anglicisations came about in the first place, because, well, i just can't see an englishman looking at "torino" on paper and going "holy shit, how do you pronounce that?" and the umlaut might be a bit confusing with munich, but once someone said it to them, why on earth should they have any trouble saying "moon-chen"¹ back, even if they've never studied another language at all?

this was discussed on last sunday's episode of my favourite public radio show, a way with words.  the verbivores were actually bitching about NBC's completely arbitrary decision to break ranks with a) the other english-speaking networks and b) all of NBC's and everyone else's history of international news coverage and talk about the "torino" olympics instead of saying "turin".  they quoted scornfully from some NBC sources who are all, "omgz, it just is so much fun to say!  to-REEE-no!"  and in this instance i'm with them because i think standardisation and following accepted usage is more important, in journalism, than one's ideological feelings about that usage.  that said, i briefly considered e-mailing them to say i did think the "sure, i'll say 'roma' if i'm in rome, but we're in america!  and we have a name for it!" sounded a bit culturally imperialistic (though i don't think it really necessarily is).

i'm also sick of learning all these ridiculous words for european countries and languages.  swedish is "ruotsia" in finnish and they actually share a border.  swedish is the second official language of the country!  it used to be a swedish colony and it was swedish-speaking finnish nationalists who helped to invent and promote the written form of finnish.  we don't call italians named davide "david" or spaniards named maria "mary" anymore, though a few centuries ago we did.  maybe it's time to outgrow this altogether. 



1. i.e. as a worst-case scenario

Comments

[thegoldsky.livejournal.com]

with italian cities, i know that torino/turin is not an isolated case. florence is actually called firenze, tuscany (more of a region, not a city, but whatever) is toscana, etc. the italian professor who teaches my inferno class uses the anglicized names when speaking in english. so i don't know what that's all about.

[cimness.livejournal.com]

yeah, finland is actually called "suomi" so another big wtf. they have nothing to do with each other. the swedes made up "finland" when they owned it, completely arbitrarily, and the finnish teacher of course refers to it as "finland" when she's explaining something in english. she also uses the english names for all the cases that finnish possesses, which i think is just totally and completely bizarre considering that many of the cases are unique to finnish--there's no reason for there to be a word for them in any other language at all, because it's not like linguists couldn't just call them by the finnish names (they aren't hard to pronounce or anything). really it just makes it more confusing.