Note: for any future commotion, this was supposed to be purely educational. Okay the question should be why do countries have to do this and why is it so hard not to? Wouldn’t it make sense to add this to the list of things the youth can learn at an early age?
Why can’t they just allow kids in schools to learn the true names of things no matter how hard they may be to pronounce? I understand the difficulty but computers and the Internet exist so we can translate and better implement this. Like some words in English where we have no single word translation like ‘Dejavu’ (pardon non autocorrect), I understand. But places were changed to make it easier to produce in a native tongue. I am sure it is not only America, or English, but wouldn’t we be better off respecting the culture and not changing the name, like we changed our map to the correct pronunciation of Turkey (Türkiye). So why don’t we change everything back to how the countries’ place names are pronounced by their citizens out of respect? We can learn how to pronounce things better. Would it make things harder or would it allow us to grow? I am genuinely curious.
Note: I understand some people won’t be able to pronounce them but why did they decide it would be better for a country/language than to just try to pronounce them correctly.
For your point about changing their names, we can’t change country names solely in English because there’s not an organization for it.
We only changed the name of Turkey to Türkiye because it requested to be named as such in the United Nations.
It seems like the nations themselves would have to request their names to be changed in all foreign languages for English to adopt it.
Thank you for this comment, I was aware, sorry for not adding as much detail as I needed to get the right answer. Seems I asked the question wrong. Wouldn’t it help to learn these things in general less, make them available to learn at younger ages? If not already, because it would be grand.
We have been doing this. Beijing used to be Peking. However all that really does in many cases is change from one wrong pronunciation to a different one. The sounds often do not exist in the other language and so the speakers cannot pronounce it correctly.