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Random Thing I Don't Get About the World

How do we as English speakers devise the spelling and description of foreign countries? I know this is completely off topic and random but frankly I don't get it. I guess I can understand changing Sverige to Sweden because well who the hell would be able to pronounce Sverige? I can understand morphing the Russian words into something more English friendly because they have letters that we don't even use. But why the hell do we say Denmark when they spell their jerseys Danmark or Brazil when they spell it Brasil? Is one letter really that difficult?

Next you move on to some countries that are mildly different but really not that hard to pronounce. We go from Slovensko to Slovakia. From Polska to Poland. From the Nederlands to the Netherlands. From Norge to Norway. From Nippon to Japan. Why the effort to change the actual country name to some mangled English slang?

And then you get to the countries that we seemingly just make up whatever we want. Did you notice Finland's ice hockey jerseys? They say Suomi which has absolutely nothing in common with Finland. The Germans say Deutschland which frankly isn't that hard to say and equally has nothing in common to the word Germany.

I'm starting to wonder what kind of ridiculous names other countries might have made up for us. Its probably something that equates to United Cocky Jackasses of the Western Hemisphere.
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Hart said…
It's probably more like, "If your government was authoritarian like ours we wouldn't be able to tell you suck because you'd behead us but because its not, we hate America, now give us our free aid!"
7:15 AM
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