Re: Pro's & Kin's

[Garrett Wollman <wollman@khavrinen.lcs.mit.edu>]

<<On Tue, 14 Oct 2003 12:07:56 -0400, Aaron Read <aread@speakeasy.net> said:

> Touche, Garrett.   :-)

I'm actually quite serious about this, as I see a significant bias:
it's only Spanish-speaking places which get this treatment.[1]  Places
where the dominant language is Portuguese, French, Dutch, German,
Russian, or Arabic do not get the same treatment.  You never hear a
news story about the International Criminal Court in Den Haag -- it's
always ``The Hague''.  Similarly, you never hear the correct German
pronunciation of places like Munich (Muenchen), Frankfurt(-am-Main),
Cologne (Koeln), Vienna (Vien), or Berne, or the correct Finnish
pronunciation of Helsinki (the accent is always on the *first*
syllable), or the correct Danish pronunciation of Copenhagen (which I
don't have the character set to even spell correctly).

-GAWollman

[1] Actually, that's not quite true: the Chinese government has also
been quite insistent on Beijing versus Peking, Sichuan versus
Szechuan, etc., and the journalists have been mostly cowed.