Posted on 02/26/2022 6:33:29 AM PST by foreverfree
It is rude. I mean, if I insisting pronouncing Irish as eerich because, well, I wanted to, you’d get that it wasn’t polite of me right? Especially if I was IN Ireland, or referring directly to you. So the only question is do you have enough basic empathy to not do to other people what you wouldn’t want done to you?
Know. It was 2000. Now things have retconned since then. But the standard for basically all of color TV until 2004 (because “red state” had become a thing was incumbent blue, challenger red.
Ukrainian vs Polish?
This is perhaps unique to Ukraine. Sasha my translator told me that Stalin had made a thing about it. He allowed no one to refer to them as a country, people having been killed for this, so I think, or at least so they certainly believe. Therefore it is a sore point with them that we use their names for their cities.
I was in western Ukraine, (Lviv, Khovel, Khmelnytskyi,) and my friends told me any Russian sympathy might be in the east or perhaps near the coast. Nobody was using Polish names I ever heard, even Poles. I stayed some nights in Warsaw on my way in and out of Lviv which my Warsaw hotel lady called Lvov, pronounced Lfoof, but I never heard anybody make that sound in that city. Americans at the Warsaw hotel called it L-vohv, and when that desk lady made a face at them, I asked her about it.
“I say L’veeve,” I said.
“That is correct,” she said, “that is Ukrainian.”
This was a nice American Express type of hotel, where every employee was fluent in English, and everything was twice as expensive as it needed to be.
“How do you say it?” I asked.
“L’foof!”
I’m no authority mind you just having been there four times (5 maybe? Nah...wife says 4) for three or four weeks each time between 1993 and 2001. My friend the founder of the school where I taught, died years ago so I am out of the loop now. We have a lot more people who help now, so I am not needed.
Along these same lines, how did Peking become Beijing??
Old: Mao Tse Tung; New” Mao Zedong; same name just rendered differently. Which gets one closer to how the Chinese say it? Beats me.
And the Cleveland Indians will never be the Cleveland Guardians to me.
Pinyin, as the official rendering of Mandarin in the latin alphabet is called is a highly developed system, including marks to show tone. It is, by definition a faithful representation provided you pronounce the letters and combinations as they are supposed to be and not necessarily as we would for a western language.
Pinyin, as the official rendering of Mandarin in the latin alphabet is called is a highly developed system
Peking=Beijing: which is closer to how the Chinese actually say the name of their capital? Is the initial sound kind of somewhere between a ‘P’ and a ‘B’? Westerners seeing ‘Beijing’ tend to want to say ‘Bay-jing’ which sounds nothing like ‘Pay-king’
I was mistaken and on a different subject. Oops ;)
But your comment is also ,liz,ls,sunkenciv, redbadger, kaslin, benlurkin relevant to the re-naming of Kiev by the media to fit their latest mantra.
“Ukraine heroic. Trump (er. Putin) bad and evil because Trump evil.”
Why then don’t we call Moscow “Moskva”?
What an interesting story! Thanks for posting.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.