Jerman, Perancis, Jepang, …

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I recently got a "Call for Papers" from an international organization whose next annual meeting will be held in Indonesia, and it's clear that part of the production of the flier was in the hands of an Indonesian person, because the affiliations of members of various listed committees included these:

Bielefeld University, Jerman
I2R, Singapura
LIMSI-CNRS, Perancis
Trinity College Dublin, Irlandia
Wonkwang University, Korea Selatan
Nara Institute of Science and Technology, Jepang

I have a great deal of respect for the organization in question, and I would doubtless do much worse if required to create a flier in Indonesian. And clearly much if not all of this is the standard Indonesian spelling of the country names in question. But still…

Update — I should add that this is related to the complicated discussions about Burma/Myanmar, Bombay/Mumbai, Milan/Milano, and so forth.



30 Comments

  1. Jim Breen said,

    April 6, 2016 @ 6:56 am

    I suspect some poor clerical underling was given part of the task, and he/she/they were not aware that the names Perancis and Jepang are not used in English. I get letters all the time from France, etc. addressed to me in "Australie". I even got one from Japan once addressed to "Meruborun". All part of life's rich tapestry.

  2. GH said,

    April 6, 2016 @ 7:06 am

    I get letters all the time from France, etc. addressed to me in "Australie".

    For addressing mail, I would consider it perfectly normal, and perhaps even preferable, to use the form of the country name used where it is sent from, on the logic that it's people there who will have to direct it to the appropriate country. If I'm sending a letter from the US to Germany, I would address it "Germany", if from Germany to France, "Frankreich", etc. For the rest of the address I would try to use the native form in the recipient country.

    Of course, these days it's more likely a computer that does the handling. And in practice I would assume that post offices all over the world could deal with every major language.

  3. S Frankel said,

    April 6, 2016 @ 7:14 am

    All those names are perfectly correct Indonesian. (And Singapura," is the official name in Malay, which is basically the same as Indonesian and is one of the official languages there.)

    Incidentally, the word for "England" is "Inggeris" (obviously from "English").

  4. Victor Mair said,

    April 6, 2016 @ 7:24 am

    "Why do the Japanese call the UK ‘Igirisu’?" (RocketNews24, 12/5/15):

    =====

    Amerika. Itaria. Kanada. The majority of countries are known in Japan by names that sound vaguely similar to their native monikers. So why on earth do the Japanese call the UK ‘Igirisu‘?

    As anyone who has spent even a few hours studying Japanese will tell you, when adapted into the Japanese syllabary, foreign names can sound rather odd. Chris becomes Kurisu; my own name, Philip, becomes Firippu (yes, I get to have a random poo stuck on the end of my name 24/7); and if your name’s Deborah but you prefer to go by Deb you can forget about being taken seriously by kids because Debu, as your name will become, also means ‘fatty’ in Japanese.

    But even with these many errant vowels and additional syllables, you have to admire Japan’s willingness to adapt foreign-sounding words into its own language. A great many countries’ names, too, are represented fairly faithfully in Japanese: the U.S. becomes Amerika; Germany, or rather Deutschland, becomes Doitsu; they even have a stab at pronouncing Australia (resulting in the admittedly rather cumbersome Oosutoraria, but still, full marks for effort, Japan!)….

    …Why is the UK called Igirisu in Japan?

    In short, it’s all because of the Portuguese….

    =====

    For "debu", see:

    "Fat shaming (?) in Rōmaji" (12/22/14)

  5. L said,

    April 6, 2016 @ 7:44 am

    This reminds me of the 2006 Winter Olympics, during which pretty much all the English-language coverage I saw neglected to translate the host city's name into English.

  6. Bart said,

    April 6, 2016 @ 8:03 am

    Indonesian people have told me that when writing from Indonesia to England you should address the envelope to 'England' rather than to 'Inggeris', and when writing from Indonesia to the Netherlands it's better to address the envelope to 'Nederland' rather than 'Belanda' (Indonesian for 'Holland').

    I suppose that if most envelopes are addressed like that, yours will be handled quicker if it's normal rather than an exception.

    Or could it be that an envelope addressed to Inggeris may get to England and somebody in the post office may find the country unrecognisable and send it back?

  7. S Frankel said,

    April 6, 2016 @ 8:19 am

    From the article Victor linked to:

    "On the international stage, Britain invariably meant the English, the Inglês, the people from 英吉利 Egeresu (later Igirisu)—a name which sticks to this day.."

    Wouldn't be surprising if the Indonesian is from Portuguese, too (there are other loan words, such as "Minggu" = Sunday, and "keju" = cheese). But the weird thing is that these come from the adjective/demonym and not from the place name.

  8. other one spoon said,

    April 6, 2016 @ 8:43 am

    The "complicated discussions about Burma/Myanmar, Bombay/Mumbai, Milan/Milano" are three very different things, and none of them are really related to this post, which seems to be nothing more than "Indonesian sounds funny." Note that the original post had "Also, it's clear that the speller has a firm grasp on the principles of alphabetic writing" where it currently says "And clearly much if not all of this is the standard Indonesian spelling of the country names in question" (edited after S Frankel pointed that out in a comment above).

    If you had seen references in an English-language document produced by a native French speaker to Allemagne, Australie, and les États-Unis, it would have been very odd to comment that the writer "clearly has a firm grasp on the principles of alphabetic writing." The only linguistic information in this post is that Mark Liberman is unfamiliar with Indonesian (which uses the Roman alphabet, and in which Perancis, Jerman, etc are just as correct as Allemagne is in French). "But still" what?

  9. Aaron said,

    April 6, 2016 @ 8:52 am

    I am confused. Why is it notable that an Indonesian person should "have a firm grasp on the principles of alphabetic writing", when the Indonesian language is written with an alphabet?

  10. Aaron said,

    April 6, 2016 @ 8:54 am

    (The bit that puzzled me appears to have been deleted after I submitted my comment.)

  11. David Morris said,

    April 6, 2016 @ 8:56 am

    At one stage I corresponded with someone in Finland, and I doubled my chances by writing 'Suomi – Finland' each time.

    Wonkwang University is Won+kwang, which is slightly less awkward looking and sounding (to me, at least) than Wonk+wang, which sounds vaguely rude.

  12. S Frankel said,

    April 6, 2016 @ 9:14 am

    Suomi – Finland is Finnish and Swedish, respectively. Snce Swedish is an official language, "Suomi" wasn't strictly necessary, but maybe it's nice thing to put, anyway.

  13. Vicki said,

    April 6, 2016 @ 9:38 am

    There are probably people who think "Suomi Finland" is the full name of the country, since that's what they print on Finnish stamps.

  14. Thorin said,

    April 6, 2016 @ 9:48 am

    Every now and then I'll get translstion offers along the lines of, "Hello, we need a Germany translator who can translate from English to Germany, preferably living in German."

  15. Thorin said,

    April 6, 2016 @ 9:49 am

    Translation* heating's broken in my house right now, so it's hard to type with frozen fingers.

  16. Victor Mair said,

    April 6, 2016 @ 10:01 am

    The official name of Taiwan is the Republic of China, but when I send letters there, I don't write that, because I'm afraid they might end up in the People's Republic of China. And I don't use the short form "ROC" because I don't think many postal clerks would know what that means. So I just write "Taiwan", and my letters usually get through, though occasionally they end up in Thailand and are sent back to me.

    Decades ago "Formosa" used to work, but I wouldn't try that now.

  17. Sili said,

    April 6, 2016 @ 10:29 am

    Jim Breen:

    I get letters all the time from France, etc. addressed to me in "Australie".

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Postal_Union

    French is the official language of the UPU. English was added as a working language in 1994.

    I was told to use French forms of the country names as a kid.

  18. Lazar said,

    April 6, 2016 @ 11:39 am

    I wonder what would be best if you were sending mail to the RoC's Fujian Province, the one part of the state which (at least in a pedantic sense) isn't part of Taiwan.

  19. Chris Button said,

    April 6, 2016 @ 12:23 pm

    The Burma/Myanmar one is a particularly interesting because they are in fact both variants of the same Old Burmese word that could be best transcribed here as "Mramma" (two syllables "mram" and "ma"). This is ironic given the heavy political overtones associated with each one now.

  20. J. W. Brewer said,

    April 6, 2016 @ 12:25 pm

    Well, mail to the ROC-administered section of Fujian is now delivered by the Taiwan Post Co., as a result of a name change several years ago perceived as confusion-minimizing by some but "splittist" by others: http://www.chinapost.com.tw/news/2007/02/11/102281/UPU-has.htm.

    But for all of these things, the practical issue (assuming for sake of illustrative simplicity that you are sending your letter from the U.S. to a Random Non-Anglophone Foreign Country) is to first, have something prominent on the envelope in roman-alphabet letters that is likely to accurately convey to the presumptively-monolingual Anglophone postal authorities in the U.S. which RNAFC they are supposed to get it to, and then second, have the rest of the address details on the envelope be written such that they are likely to be intelligible to the postal authorities in the particular RNAFC so that they can accurately deliver it the rest of the way. I've never personally experimented with using a non-Latin script for everything except the country name, but it seems like it ought to work, and might even be advisable if the RNAFC personnel were not necessarily going to be literate in a romanized version of the local language. When my family lived in Tokyo back in the 70's, we got our mail from the U.S. just fine and didn't encourage anyone to try to use kanji or kana on the envelopes, but that worked smoothly at least in part because we could be confident that the local mailmen could read romaji with sufficient fluency.

  21. Robert Davis said,

    April 6, 2016 @ 1:52 pm

    I remember being surprised at how close Firenze seemed to be to Florence.

  22. James Wimberley said,

    April 7, 2016 @ 6:22 am

    Sorry to spoil the fun, but there are lists of unambiguous two- and three- letter codes in ISO 3166. All post offices can deal with these.
    The curious campaign for "authentic" place names looks to me like a moral category mistake. Persons are entitled to their names, the way they spell them. You can't really apply this across a change of alphabet, but Russians say don't seem to have strong views about "correct" transliteration. A city should be proud to have names in lots of foreign languages. A pity that "Leghorn" has gone.

  23. Andrew said,

    April 7, 2016 @ 2:29 pm

    I agree with other one spoon on this on the fact that Burma/Myanmar, Bombay/Mumbai, Milan/Milano are very different issues than this simple mistake, and that the original comment ("clearly has a firm grasp on the principles of alphabetic writing") is a bit mean-spirited.

    There are no political or ethnic divisions on whether one should write "Jerman" or "Germany" in the same way that "Myanmar" vs "Burma" or "Mumbai" vs "Bombay" (Kolkata/Calcutta, etc.) is controversial. "Germany" is standard in English and "Jerman" in Indonesian. That's it!

  24. Andrew said,

    April 7, 2016 @ 2:32 pm

    @Victor:

    My dad, born and raised in Taiwan but now living in the States, always used to address things "Taiwan ROC" when I was growing up in the 1990s (the frequency of physical letters has slowed dramatically with the advent of electronic communication). I can't remember if he wrote the Taiwanese address in Chinese characters ever, but I know there were definitely times where the entire address would be Romanized (in inexact Wade-Giles, of course.)

  25. Max said,

    April 7, 2016 @ 3:01 pm

    I've heard that the Republic of Korea recommends always addressing all letters to Seoul (but with the correct post code, or perhaps with Seoul below the correct city) to maximize the probability of reaching the right Korea.

  26. Victor Mair said,

    April 7, 2016 @ 4:29 pm

    @Max

    For Korea, I always write "North Korea" or "South Korea". However, since America (and the West in general) has so little to do with North Korea, even if I were only to write "Korea", I would feel fairly confident that my letter would reach the intended recipient in South Korea. In other words, I think that, for most Americans, when we say "Korea", "South Korea" is the default, whereas "North Korea" must be specified in full from the outset.

  27. AntC said,

    April 7, 2016 @ 6:27 pm

    Having just filled in an international postal form …

    The New Zealand postal service requires you to put the destination country name in English. (But says nothing about the rest of the address.) This follows @GH's logic.

    OTOH it has no advice how to style fliers for CfPs. In what language are the Papers to be written/presented? Perhaps the Indonesian admin should have asked each institution how it prefers to be styled?

  28. Alan said,

    April 7, 2016 @ 8:42 pm

    This is absolutely refreshing! And who's to say this wasn't intentionally done for a bit of local color? One can't always be pandering to the anglophones of the world and it might also be more useful for the presenters to know the Indonesian names of their respective countries when they get there anyway.

    In any case, there's already plenty of accommodation to the English language to go around in SE Asia. And relatedly, in the standard Malay of Malaysia/Singapore/Brunei, Germany is "Jerman" as in Indonesian, South Korea is also "Korea Selatan", Japan is "Jepun", etc. while the United Kingdom is rendered as "United Kingdom", England is "England", Britain is "Britain", Scotland is "Scotland" etc. :-)

  29. V said,

    April 8, 2016 @ 4:42 am

    L said: "This reminds me of the 2006 Winter Olympics, during which pretty much all the English-language coverage I saw neglected to translate the host city's name into English."

    Doubly strange because the name of the city in Piedmontese is Turin, and the English name is essentially the local name, while "Torino" is an exonym.

  30. Brett said,

    April 8, 2016 @ 5:03 pm

    @V: The Italian national government decided to use the standard Italian, not local, name. If I'm not mistaken, the ubiquitous use of "Torino" goes all the way back to the bidding process for the games.

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