I say Myanmar, you say Burma

[Mark Mandel]

tOn 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".

--
Mark Mandel

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