Discussion Forum—A Way with Words, a fun radio show and podcast about language

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First, this is a very good question, and also a concern of mine. There are many different reasons for this phenomenon: romanization (transcription into our alphabet); representation of foreign sounds into English phonemes; pronouncing spellings (native or transcribed) with English phonemes; historical divergence, and others.

I hope it is a comfort that English is certainly not the only language to do this. I feel confident that one can find examples in most languages.

Moscow: even in Russian, the word Moskva takes a fleeting vowel between the k and v (compare moskovskij, the adjective form). In many Slavic languages which use the Roman alphabet (e.g. Polish), the V sound is represented by the letter W. So Moskow is not so far from the original. All that remains is to pronounce it as spelled (like Paris, instead of Paree).

Havana has to do with the way the b/v is pronounced in Spanish. Since we don't have an exact match for that sound, we pick a close one, and fell on the side of the v.

India is historic. It comes via the Latin and Greek for the area around the Indus river. Bharat is a much more political and narrow name for one of the many kingdoms that once were in the region of India.

Japan is a compounded transcription issue via Chinese of all things! Still, I guarantee that the Japanese name for the US is no closer to our pronunciation than Japan is to “origin of the sun” in Japanese (Nihon might be a better transcription than Nippon, after all). As it turns out, Japan is a corruption of the transcribed Chinese (Mandarin) for the characters that represent Japan (jih for “sun” – a retroflex sound in Chinese that does not occur in English – and pun for “origin”, which sounds more like “bun” but is transcribed with a P for linguistic reasons)

We are getting better. We are trading older mispronounced words for updated closer representations: Beijing for Peking; Mumbai for Bombay (and many others).

Wow, you are my new hero.

I did not think to take into consideration the V-W aspect of Slavic &(Polish) languages as they move west.

I knew about the funny Spanish V. Native speakers can almost not detect the difference between V and B; I simply used Havana as an example.
Bharat as well does refer to the ancient area of Bharata, yes.

However, in Russian, if one means to say "in Russian" one says: Po-Ruskii
A Russian is a Russicheski?...I may be mistaken, my Spanish is worlds ahead of my Russian.

боже мои!

Thank you for caring.
Deseo hablarte pronto.

Endearingly,
-Gabriel Mackenzie Ferguson

And in Chinese they are de2 guo2 ren2 (德國人 德国人). This literally means ethic nation people, where the nation people part is a fixed formula for specifying nationality. But the de2 德 (ethic) part comes from the practice of abbreviating countries to monosyllables. The fullest form, rarely used, is de2 yi4 zhi4 德意志, an approximation of Deutsch.

Languages have their own transcription conventions that don't always make a lot of sense to those of the language of origin. In Russian, they transcribe English H with a Russian G, even though the Russian X (a throaty fricative like an unvoiced French R) sounds much more like an H to English speakers. So Hemingway comes out sounding like ghee-ming-vie (Гемингвай)! And Hamlet is Gamlyet (гамлет).