From The Mind of Merc - Country Names

Sometimes I find my mind wandering over various eclectic topics and occasionally I am inspired to write some of them down.  Today I was thinking about names of countries.

It’s a small thought but it occurred to me how odd it is that in our progressive multicultural society that we still use our own words to refer to the countries of other nationalities. What I mean is that instead of paying attention to how people from other countries chose to refer to their homeland we instead insist on using our own words to label them (almost as if to make them more acceptable to us.)

Surely if we want to truly embrace intercultural integration we should be using the names that natives use for their own countries.

For example, this would mean that Europe would include of:

France (France)
Deutschland (Germany)
España (Spain)
Italia (Italy)
Elláda (Greece)
Bŭlgariya (Bulgaria)
Danmark (Denmark)
Nederland (Netherlands)
Suomi (Finland)
Sverige (Sweden)
Magyarország (Hungary)
Norge (Norway)
Polska (Poland)

Some people may say that we use our own words to make these foreign places seem more familiar to us and easier to acclimatise ourselves to. But a lot of these are not very different from the names we currently use and would not be difficult to adopt. Going forward this could be what schoolchildren are taught when they learn the names of countries and it would certainly be easier for people travelling abroad to grasp the local lingo and culture.

Also, how wrong is it to presume to acclimatise ourselves to other cultures in a way that alienates ourselves from those same cultures through our disrespect of a crucial aspect of their national identity.

Forcing our own names onto other countries is little better than forcing family names onto servants – just as the slave-owners used to do in the days before abolition. This may have been acceptable over a century ago but it surely has no place in the world nowadays.

Things need to change. If we truly want to embrace our overseas relations then perhaps we should start by not foisting our own (for them) alien words onto them. We would expect respect for our culture and our land and we should extend the same courtesy to others and abandon the out-of-date and inappropriate approach to naming countries in our own language.