I say Myanmar, you say Burma

[Dan Goodman]

Mark Mandel wrote:
>
> On Tue, May 6, 2008 at 4:21 AM, David Borowitz <borowitz at stanford.edu> wrote:
>
>> Wikipedia, as it often does, tells a good story about the various names of
>> Burma:
>> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Names_of_Burma
>>
>> Except for the fact that one of these transliterations is of recent origin
>> and has been seized by the ruling party as some sort of nationalistic
>> symbol, this seems a lot like plenty of other phonetic English
>> pronunciations of historic or sloppy transliterations. (Think of the foreign
>> policy impacts if Russia started getting mad at us for not saying /rasiya/.)
>
> Not so far off: Post-USSR Ukraine made quite a point of not being
> "*the* Ukraine".

I've been using "Ukraine" as the name of the country, and "the Ukraine"
as the name of the region.

My maternal grandfather was born in the Ukraine.  His birthplace is
currently in Belarus.

--
Dan Goodman
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