LOL
There are 3 Hollands here in Wisconsin!


You're right. Nobody would say that.

On a completely unrelated note, I in general prefer the use of common names for places.

For example Peking over Beijing, Canton over Guangzhou, etc. Sometimes I use the Chinese names if I know someone would be offended though.

I mean honestly, let a language have native names for foreign places.

Anyone else feel this way or am I just weird?

I think we need to decide what we're going to call all these countries. We say Japan, why not Nihon, but Beijin instead of Peking.

But I never use Peking or Canton, haha. No one would understand me.

Peking and Canton are the common names now? The only place I've seen them used is in old books.

The reason that Beijing is sometimes called "Peking", is because the Europeans used another transcription system when they first named the city, and that Chinese has undergone a sound change since then. In modern Hànyǔ Pīnyīn transcription it would be "Běijīng".

Is there anything wrong with that?

Take Japanese (or Korean, maybe even Vietnamese) as an example. They borrowed Chinese words from a long time ago, and still use somewhat archaic (and unorganized) pronunciations. Though lately in Japan it is the style to use the modern Chinese reading for things, but I don't like that either.

But yeah, I was just trying to give an example when I sad Peking and Canton. Maybe I should have said "native" names instead of common names, as they are definitely not common anymore.

Korea as well. Nowadays, 베이징 /pey.i.cing/ is more common than the traditional Sino-Korean reading, 북경 /puk.kyeng/.

A lot of "traditional" forms are on the retreat in English as well, even when the name hasn't undergone a high-profile alternation for political reasons (as is common in the Subcontinent these days). When I lived in the Black Forest, we Americans all thought the Brits were crazy to call Basel "Bale" and though every kid of my generation grew up with Foghorn Leghorn, I'll wager not one in a hundred could identify "Leghorn" with Livorno in Italy. It's an inevitable sort of change.

It's been a few years since I've heard the Chinese capital referred to as anything other than Beijing, and now Peking sounds downright quaint.

I don't often refer to either the United Kingdom or the UK. If I go to London, I say I'm going to England. If I want to talk about something that applies to England and Scotland and Wales and Northern Ireland..., then I'll refer to it as the United Kingdom or the UK.

Holland is part of the Netherlands, not all of it. I'm not sure where the boundary is between Holland and the rest of the country, so I call the country the Netherlands and the people and language Dutch.

On a related note, I've had people from outside my country criticize me for referring to myself as American. I get responses such as "North, Central or South American?" There's no good, common word to refer to people and things from the USA, so I've started using the term "U S American," pronounced as "yew ess American." It's easy to say and it gets the point across.

I think it's better to call a city/country/place by its up-to-date native name. It can be quite confusing sometimes - e.g. it took me a while to realize that the German "Mailand" is the Italian city Milano (which is called "Milan" in English ...).

I've got my bellyfull of people like that. I'll stop calling myself "American" when the Germans stop calling me "Amerikaner", the French stop calling me "Américain", the Russian stop calling me "американец" and so on and so on.

From what I can tell, it's mainly a concern for Spanish-speakers, who differentiate clearly between "of the Americas" and "of the United States" in their language. Good for them! I distinguish "fingers" from "toes", but I'm not about to insist that their language do that, too.