I've heard that, since it has come to light, this vocabularic hole has caused such outrage among the Inuit that they've collectively decided to repurpose word for snow #43 to mean "freedom" from now on instead.
Seriously, those vague pronouncements about language with "no word for" or "[x] words for" are simplistic and usually at least partly made up, but I think they're interesting as a meta topic.
Seriously, those vague pronouncements about language with "no word for" or "[x] words for" are simplistic and usually at least partly made up, but I think they're interesting as a meta topic.
(I was able to find it eventually by casting around for this definition, because I heart this word.)
Ah. I've sondered quite a lot. Mostly when on public transportation, looking at the windows in apartment buildings as they light up, filled with evenings after work. People coming home to feed their pets, put some ice in a glass, turn on the TV, think about the weekend, and so on.
What do Warsaw, Florence, and Vienna have in common? They are all exonyms, which is a word I have wanted for a long time.
Since I moved to Germany, I have been falling over all sorts of exonyms, my favourite being "Danube". The river flows by a few miles from here through a small town called Donauwörth, which gets its name from "Donau" which is what they call the Danube round here. Having learned that the Donau was indeed the mighty Danube of myth, legend and cheesey waltz, I idly wondered at which point along its great length it changed its name to the one I was familiar with. And of course the answer is, it doesn't. Not anywhere, not ever.
Now I find this a bit embarrassing. Having your own names for other people's places can, and often does, look culturally arrogant (see Ayers Rock) and here I am, an Englishman in Bavaria, humming the Blue Danube and Oktoberfestating in Munich.
Bavaria and Munich together with football (lol soccer) present a peculiar exonymic enigma in the form of the local team known throughout the English-speaking world as "Bayern Munich". If not Bayern München then Bavaria Munich, surely?
Even Hungary has exonyms in Hungarian. I was speaking with a guy from Hungary, and we were talking about how the names of countries in English and Hungarian were very much different. It appears that most, if not all, languages adopt their own exonyms for "them" that's different from what the "us" call themselves. A lot of older countries in Europe have a suffix word added to the country. (Olaszország for Italy, Franciaország for France, but Kanada for Canada.) (I find Magyar interesting.)
Is Paris an exonym, in spoken English? Spelled the same but pronouncedly differently.
Exonyms that are respellings of the endonyms into the receiving language's common patterns probably account for most of them ... Fiorenze to Florence, London to Lontoon (Finnish), etc. And then may get a life of their own and get distorted over time, which is I assume how we get Munchen to Munich, London to Londres, etc.
The really interesting ones are ones that have no obvious connection with the endonym or some (possibly historical) part of the country.
The Finnish for Sweden is Ruotsi, and for Russia Venäjä. I have no idea where those names come from, and nor does the internet.
From archaic ruotsi (“Swede”), from Old Swedish *roþs- (“related to rowing”); related to Old Norse Roþrslandi (“the land of rowing”), older name of Roslagen, where the Finns and Swedes first met, from roðr (“steering oar”), from Proto-Germanic *rōaną (“to row”), from Proto-Indo-European *h₁reh₁- (“to row”).[1]
Is Paris an exonym, in spoken English? Spelled the same but pronouncedly differently.
Exonyms that are respellings of the endonyms into the receiving language's common patterns probably account for most of them ... Fiorenze to Florence, London to Lontoon (Finnish), etc. And then may get a life of their own and get distorted over time, which is I assume how we get Munchen to Munich, London to Londres, etc.
Some of those are actually accounted for by borrowings which retained (some) of the original, older pronunciation, while the endonym continued to change in the native language.
For example, "fl" changing to "fi" was a change that happened in Italian (cf. flamma > fiamma 'flame', flumen > fiume 'river'). The English version comes from French (presumably from the original Latin), while in Italian it changed from Latin Florentia to Fiorenza to Firenze.
Obviously English vowels and stress patterns tend to be inaccurate, but on the "fl" part, English didn't change anything.
The same is true of Paris - the spelling reflects the older French pronunciation, so in pronouncing the 's', we aren't mangling anything.
Quote:
The really interesting ones are ones that have no obvious connection with the endonym or some (possibly historical) part of the country.
The Finnish for Sweden is Ruotsi, and for Russia Venäjä. I have no idea where those names come from, and nor does the internet.
From archaic ruotsi (“Swede”), from Old Swedish *roþs- (“related to rowing”); related to Old Norse Roþrslandi (“the land of rowing”), older name of Roslagen, where the Finns and Swedes first met, from roðr (“steering oar”), from Proto-Germanic *rōaną (“to row”), from Proto-Indo-European *h₁reh₁- (“to row”).[1]
Ruotsi and Russia have the same origin in a way, actually.
The Rus' of Kievan Rus' comes from Roslagen, probably as a result of Vikings becoming the rulers of Kiev. The modern form of the name "Russia" itself is from Byzantine Greek but seems likely a back-derivation from Rus' (i.e. they already had the name Rus', and assumed a Greek derivation and thus settled on Greek Rosia > Russian Rossiya).
In Dutch we usually use the Flemish names for Belgian towns, while English usually uses the French names, except for the larger towns where there are English names (Bruges, Brussels, Antwerp) that are closer to the Flemish names.
Even the towns in French Flanders have Flemish names that the Flemish still usually use but the Dutch usually don't (Lille is called Rijssel for instance). Except Duinkerken (Dune Church) which is the original name of Dunkirk.
Now that I think about it we Dutchies also have a tendency to name the Belgian Walloon towns by their French names. Mons instead of Bergen, Bastogne instead of Bastenaken, with the exception of Luik instead of Liege.
Thread for words and word lovers
at "word for snow #43"
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