Your hypothesis is right, or at least it's something that other people have considered as a possibility. I remember seeing an article a few years ago about how non-phonetic transliterations are chosen for foriegn languages to make them look more "exotic." The article said that it happened especially with Romanized transliterations of Chinese (with unhelpful spellings like "xiao" and "qing") and Arabic (where a simple word may be transliterated a dozen different ways). The article argued that such spellings result from an attempt to make people of other nationalities seem more foriegn and incomprehensible than they are, to put more distance between "them" and "us." The article suggested that more sympathy would happen between peoples if we standardized some systems of transliteration that were more phonetic.
A similar psychological thing probably goes on with giving places completely different names in each language. Those are even weirder because "Germany" doesn't even remotely sound like Deutschland. How did people come up with those things?
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Date: 2006-11-02 12:55 am (UTC)A similar psychological thing probably goes on with giving places completely different names in each language. Those are even weirder because "Germany" doesn't even remotely sound like Deutschland. How did people come up with those things?