Wow. I guess in Korean that is easier to do, since people don't use hanja in everyday life, but in Japanese it confuses the heck out of you because you see the kanji and want to read it with its Japanese reading.

I still think it is crazy. With the sole exception of Seoul, which was only recently changed to 首爾, Chinese still use Chinese names for Korean cities. (Though I support the Chinese Seoul name change, mainly because the Korean name was changed too and Chinese were still calling it by the old Korean name since the new one wasn't Sino Korean.) So why does Korea use Chinese names?



I suppose it is best to call a place by its up-to-date name. But I still wish that the native names should be used over the foreign names as these up-to-date names.

How about "Yankee"?
I, being a Red Sox fan, don't particularly care for the term, though.


Probably because the overwhelming majority of Korean placenames are Sino-Korean anyway.

I believe this only happens in a few prominent cases. Shanghai is 상하이 /sang.ha.i./, but I think Chengdu is still 성도 more often than 청두.

The reasons why exonyms develop are complex, and so are the reasons for changing or discarding them. To some degree, familiarity is a factor. If you speak a language, you get used to using the native form of the name and switching can sound very odd. In the past, very few Koreans ever travelled to China or heard modern Mandarin spoken. Things are very different now.


You've lost me. What are you calling a "native name" and what is a "foreign name"? "Beijing" is what the natives call their city and "Peking" is a name given it by foreigners.

"Native/foreign name" might not be listed in the dictionary with those definitions, but I think it's pretty clear what he's talking about. I don't think he has "lost" you - you, and I suppose everyone else here, understood very well what he meant.

Sorry. I meant that I prefer the exonyms. (I didn't know there was a word for this)

I guess one of the main reasons is because exonyms fit in/sound better with the language than the endonym.

Hehe. Even Yankee doesn't apply to all people from the USA, only those from the North. I learned this the hard way: using the term in the South (baaaaad idea ).

It took me a few years of Internet immersion to realize that.

Haha, I liked that example.

How the hell can you presume to tell me what I understood and what I didn't? And, moreover, why even bother? I asked, he clarified--no harm, no foul, we moved on.


"Yankee" is one of those fascinating terms that gets more specific the closer you get to its point of origin. To me--a Northerner--"Yankees" are from the Northeast. To Northeasterners, they are New Englanders, and to New Englanders they are Protestant New Englanders from established families.

"Redneck" is somewhat similar despite being a social designation rather than a regional one. Originally, it was a Southern term for rural whites who had to hire themselves out as farm labourers because they didn't own land of their own, and for me it still has something of the sense of "rural Southern trailer trash". But recently I've heard it used to mean "any white rural-dweller" and even "any white person with conservative views", regardless of social class or place of origin.

Coming from the south, a red-neck is usually does manual labor, they're also racist and concervative. Usually by the time they are thirty they only have three teeth left and 16 kids. They watch Nascar, smoke, and drink a lot of beer.

A red-neck is a very specified term, 'round cheer.

Wow. And here I thought that 'rednecks' literally had red necks.

I mean they do, right? Most of the time.