How long will it be...

[Communisto]

...until people around the west stop saying "Hong Kong" and "Macau"? How long until they start saying "Xianggang" and "Aomen" instead? The last two are the correct romanizations of those two placenames, since the Pinyin romanization is now the correct one to use in the Xianggang SAR since China has owned it since 1997.

And by "people," I mean Westerners.

Anyone?

I'm gonna go with who cares? I find it hard to believe the Chinese can perfectly pronounce United States of America, and probably have their own name for it. What does it matter what we refer to them as?

 

[LightFang]

I'm gonna go with who cares? I find it hard to believe the Chinese can perfectly pronounce United States of America, and probably have their own name for it. What does it matter what we refer to them as?

Yes, they do. It's called "mei guo" and means roughly "Beautiful Country".

Sounds nothing like The United States of America, does it? =P

'Least Japan comes sort of close. amerika is their approximation. They can't pronounce their Rs, so it's not like it's a misspelling.

 

[GenMarshall]

As soon as the Chinese say France instead of Faguo

Almost rymes with Ragou

 

[Zhuge_Liang]

Hong Kong and Macau? there's nothing wrong there. Let the people choose what they want it to be called.

 

[Dann]

Re: OP
Never! Hong Kong is the correct pronounciation of 香港. If your dialect is Cantonese. Which the inhabitants of that place are. So there.

Xianggang is the Mandarin pronounciation. And is just as legitimate a pronounciation of 香港. Which the rest of China besides Guangdong uses.

As for 北京 (Beijing) it too can be read in multiple ways. A Hokkien speaker on Taiwan will refer to it as Pak-khia instead for example.

Language is a strange creature. Not necessarily obedient to logic but rather more to habit and tradition. Usually the term something becomes famous in gets stuck forever. For example when I want to say 北京烤鸭 in English I don't say Beijing Roast Duck but Peking Roast Duck instead.

 

[Kraznaya]

Re: OP
Never! Hong Kong is the correct pronounciation of 香港. If your dialect is Cantonese. Which the inhabitants of that place are. So there.

Xianggang is the Mandarin pronounciation. And is just as legitimate a pronounciation of 香港. Which the rest of China besides Guangdong uses.

We should romanize Shanghai in the Wu Dialelct then.

 

[MobBoss]

Well, you know there's a reason we say "Beijing" and no "Peking," "Chongqing" and not "Chungking," "Guangzhou" and not "Canton," "Xiamen" and not "Amoy," etc. I see absolutely no reason to not do the same for Xianggang.

And yet I still order Peking duck, but not Beijing duck.

 

[Grisu]

what's the problem with having different names for the same place in different languages?

Should the French stop saying Londres? or Angleterre?
Should the Germans stop using Moskau or Rom or Venedig or Florenz?
Should the English/Americans stop using Cologne or Munich?

Frankly I see no point in it. If you wish start using the names you want, but don't expect others to know what you're talking about.

Also: what Dann said (not that I had any idea beforehand )

 

[Arwon]

I must say I'm confused by the flaming that's going on here. Are people finding LC's question personally threatening or something?

Then why do we use the correct names for all other Chinese cities? Why the exception for Xianggang?

We don't actually. It varies by place. We say Tibet, not Xizang (is that right?), for instance.

Hong Kong is a different case because it actually has some presence in the West's imagination because of its period of British rule, and there are a lot of English speakers from there in comparison to other parts of China. I mean, have friends from Hong Kong and since they identify themselves as being from Hong Kong I'm gonna stick with that.

Plus as Dann points out, if it's the correct Cantonese name then it should probably remain that.

Macau is probably more malleable and I'd think that in a couple of generations it will probably shift towards the other term.

 

[RedRalph]

Same goes for Taiwan/Formosa

 

[Eran of Arcadia]

Welcome to the world of different languages. Even proper nouns have different words in different languages. Like everyone said. Heck, if I could remember the Polish word for Germany offhand (it starts with an "n" - Niemiscy or somesuch) I would know 4 independent, linguistically unrelated names for a single country.

EDIT: Niemcy, I wasn't too far off.

 

[Brighteye]

I had a friend from Macau, who used that term. He had no problem with using the British word. So neither do I.
Hong-Kong has been known as Hong-Kong for the duration of its importance in the world. It's at least as legitimate a name as any other.

 

[LucyDuke]

Welcome to the world of different languages. Even proper nouns have different words in different languages. Like everyone said. Heck, if I could remember the Polish word for Germany offhand (it starts with an "n" - Niemiscy or somesuch) I would know 4 independent, linguistically unrelated names for a single country.

EDIT: Niemcy, I wasn't too far off.

http://www.straightdope.com/classics/a2_162.html

Spoiler :

Dear Cecil:

I've always wondered why there are such widely varying names in different languages for the country between France and Poland. We call it Germany, the French call it Allemagne, and the Germans themselves call it Deutschland. Surely we see in such disagreements the roots of much recent tragic history. Why can't everybody just be sensible and settle on one name? --Listener, Drew Hayes Show, WMAQ, Chicago

Cecil replies:

You're a good soul, Les, but you lack an appreciation of the philological niceties. There is no necessary correspondence between a nation's name for itself and the name outsiders bestow upon it. This is especially true when the nation or people is very old. In ancient times, when international affairs consisted chiefly of heaving rocks at the tribe over the hill, a people's name for itself was often the local equivalent of "us folks" or "the people," while its name for foreigners was generally some variant on "those frog-faced heathens" or, more kindly, "the gang over yonder." Naturally, the gang over yonder called itself "the people" in its own language while reserving another term for the cretins down the pike.

The various names for Germany are a good example of this. The deutsch in Deutschland probably derives from the Indo-European root teuta- (or tewt-, depending on which authority you believe), the source of our word Teuton. Teuta- means "the tribe" or "the people," the word the early Germans used to describe themselves.

The Romans, meanwhile, referred to the German-speaking tribes collectively as Germani. Where they got this word is not clear. Many authorities believe it was a Celtic term meaning "neighbors" that the Gauls bestowed on the folks next door. (There's an Old Irish word gair meaning "neighbor," although there's also an Old Irish word gairm meaning "battle cry." The path of linguistic progress is never easy.) One holdout thinks it was the name of a Celtic people the Teutons conquered and whose name somehow got transferred to the victors.

Moving right along, one of the German-speaking tribes in Roman times was called the Alemanni. They settled in what is now Alsace in the fourth century AD and were defeated by the Franks in 496. Alemanni may derive from an early German word meaning "all the men," which I suppose is roughly equivalent to "all us guys"--as opposed, naturally, to all you guys. The Franks, in a moment of uncharacteristic liberality, apparently decided to call the Alemanni by the name they called themselves. Later, by means of the metaphoric process called synecdoche, taking the part for the whole, the Franks applied the name to all the German-speaking tribes, and thus we have Allemagne. The Spanish, not having strong opinions on the subject, sensibly simplified the orthography and wound up with Alemania.

The various names for Germany are perhaps the extreme example of diversity in geographical nomenclature. The Italians call Germany Germania, but their word for a German is tedesco, which is their quaint attempt to spell Teuton. The Polish word for Germany is Niemcy, whose meaning is entirely mysterious, at least to me. Given the Polish experience of German manners during time of war, however, I could guess.

THE TEEMING MILLIONS CLARIFY THE SITUATION

Regarding your recent column on names for Germany, I once heard a story you may want to verify about how the Russians originated their word for Germany. Seems that in the late Middle Ages the czars invited Westerners, notably Dutch and German craftsmen, to settle in Russian cities because of their skills. The locals found they couldn't make the newcomers understand their language, so they naturally assumed they were deaf and dumb. Hence the Russian term for a German, nyemetz, which means "mute." This seems similar to the Polish word for Germany, Niemcy. Can you confirm?

More trivia: in Finnish (not related to any of the above), the word for Germany and the German language is Saksa. Looks familiar, especially since the German word for Saxony, in southeast Germany, is Sachsen. Interestingly (or maybe not), the Irish word for a Briton is sasenach. It's also an imprecation. --Steve M., Chicago

Dear Steve:

You've got the right basic idea, but the part about the czars and the craftsmen is apocryphal doodoo--the terms date back to prehistory. Nyemetz (often transliterated nemets) quite likely derives from Russian nemoy, a mute, as in "those guys who are so out of it they are incapable of talking like normal people." Variations on this theme occur in virtually all Slavic languages, including Polish niemiecki, a German, niemy, mute.

Similarly, our word "barbarian" is believed to derive from the Greek barbaros--non-Greek, foreign, rude--which many scholars say comes from the Indo-European root baba-, a word "imitative of unarticulated speech," my dictionary says. The ancient Greeks evidently thought foreign chitchat all sounded like "ba-ba-ba," baby talk, although I suppose you could also make the case they'd just stumbled across some primeval ancestor of the Beach Boys, as in "Ba-ba-ba, ba-ba-ber Ann." OK, sorry, I'll stop.

Baba-, in any case, is the source of our words baby and babble. Just to extinguish any lingering curiosity you may have on the subject, our word "infant" comes from Latin infans, "nonspeaking," incapable of speech.

As for Saksa and sassenach, both likely derive from the same root as our word Saxon. The Saxons, you may remember, were a German tribe that invaded Britain along with the Angles and the Jutes. By my count this now gives us five entirely independent names for the home of the Volkswagen: Germany, Deutschland, Allemagne, Niemcy, and Saksa. To these we must add a sixth: the Lithuanian Vokietija. I dunno where it comes from, and I don't want to know. This has gone on long enough.

DEPARTMENT OF OFFENDED SENSIBILITIES, PART ONE

Dear Cecil:

The last paragraph of your column on the various names for the Germans goes off in the wrong direction. The Italians' tedesco is not "their quaint attempt to spell Teuton." It is only a slightly modified rendition of the German word teodisk. Actually, the Italian is closer to the Old German word than modern German (Deutsch) is! Of course, I don't think Italians will mind. They're used to the Americans and English making them look quaint or silly. --Louis R., Department of French and Italian, University of Wisconsin at Madison

Cecil replies:

Lighten up, doc. It's my life's dream to make everybody look quaint or silly. Just wait till you see the number I do next week on the Uzbeks.

DEPARTMENT OF OFFENDED SENSIBILITIES, PART TWO

Dear Cecil:

In your item on country names, you seem to reveal a belief that the Franks were some kind of Frenchmen, therefore a cut above the barbarous German hordes. In fact, the Franks were German by any definition one might choose. Most important, they spoke German. This includes Charlemagne, or Karl der Grosse, as he is more properly known. Of course, there was as yet no France or Germany. (Mostly, there was no France.) At the time of ancient Rome, most of Europe consisted of uncouth barbarians. Barbarians are where you find them. There are still a lot around. --Lee J., Oak Park, Illinois

Dear Lee:

Let's not get personal, fella. I'm not the one who invented Gummy Rats.

--CECIL ADAMS

 

[Masquerouge]

Re: OP
Never! Hong Kong is the correct pronounciation of 香港. If your dialect is Cantonese. Which the inhabitants of that place are. So there.

Oooohhh you just pwned the entire thread

 

[Irish Caesar]

Most of us aren't going to. As long as we can remember seeing "Made in Hong Kong" written on things, we're not going to call it something else.

And even if it was more "correct," (although it's been pointed out that it isn't anyway!) it's not as well understood. Similarly, I will continue to refer to the Kingdom of the Rising Sun as Japan instead of Nippon; Calcutta instead of the new spelling; Burma instead of Myanmar (mostly for ease of pronunciation); Jerusalem instead of Yerushalayim or al-Quds.

"Guangzhou" and not "Canton,"

I say Canton and will continue to do so; isn't that where "Cantonese" comes from?

I also call him Chiang Kai-shek instead of Jiang Jieshi.

I prefer to have people understand me when I speak.

And yet I still order Peking duck, but not Beijing duck.

And if you ordered Beijing duck, you'd probably be given a rude look by the waiter...

One of the most important purposes of communication is being understood. Nobody knows where the heck Xianggang is, and anyone who does would understand me when I call it Hong Kong. For clarity's sake, I'm going to call it what other people know it as.

 

[Newbunkle]

Hong Kong and Macau? there's nothing wrong there. Let the people choose what they want it to be called.

I agree. Even my friends from Hong Kong call it "Hong Kong" when they're talking to me. Nobody makes a fuss when we call Deutschland Germany.