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Comment by andyking | Hacker News Reader

The language of the place names seems fairly arbitrary too.

I've noticed them switch a few times from English to Welsh and back in Wales - Caerdydd instead of Cardiff, Pen-y-bont for Bridgend. Something similar happened to Ireland for a few weeks last year, too. For some reason, Gaelic seems to be excluded from this; I haven't seen Steòrnabhagh yet!

The centring of the map has changed, too - when they first put up the map of the UK, zooming in from the default location would bring you right into the centre of my town. Now it's in the Irish Sea.

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Do you speak Gaelic?

This is something I don't understand, living as I do in Wales. Stornoway, say, is the name of the place? If that is the name then for a Gaelic person the name should be "Stornoway" (or I'd accept a transliteration) and not something that is pronounced differently, no?

When I speak to a Russian I don't change my name to Па́вел, it's my name. I can understand to some extent people in another country applying a different name, or applying a different pronounciation of the same word (eg Paris), but I don't understand why you'd translate a name.

/rant

But people do translate names. Since you're Russian, I'll give this example: What do English speakers call a Саша? Why, usually, it's not Sasha - it's Alex.

don't overthink it. in germany, the state is called Bayern, even though it's "Bavaria" in english.

same thing with my current town: it's called "Aachen" in german, but "aix-la-chapelle" in english or "aken" in dutch.

Bayern vs Bavaria is not translation. Presumably it's a historic transliteration that has mutated over time.

Aachen and Aken are clearly related by transliteration, fine, same name written using different sounds. Aix-la-Chapelle again is not a translation.

Round here a place gets called Bridgend, that's the original name. Close to 100% of the population speak English. Those that don't tend not to speak Welsh either. The name gets translated as Pen-y-bont (end of bridge) as if it were simply a description not a name. Then all the modern vocab is taken from English and most speakers in the South use a mix including English language words; yet for some reason nearly all the names have to be translated? It gets worse as most of the natives can't pronounce the Welsh version of their own town names correctly.

/rantingmyassoffboyoisntit

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