Reflections | Iran, Sri Lanka – countries’ names change. China’s has too, for its own people. Will it change again if reunified?
- Myanmar/Burma. Eswatini/Swaziland. Thailand/Siam. Countries’ names can change. In China the state’s official name has changed through the centuries
- Pundits speculate about a further change if China reunifies with Taiwan. Would foreigners still use ‘China’? Let’s hope the questions are answered peacefully
The death toll from the earthquake that devastated Türkiye and Syria last month is a heart-rending 47,000 at the time of writing, and it’s expected to rise given that many people are still unaccounted for.
There will always be resistance to change in the beginning, but usually the new names will prevail. Today, nobody calls Thailand by its old name “Siam” any more, unless they’re referring to the country in certain historical contexts. The same goes for Iran (Persia), Sri Lanka (Ceylon), and so on.
A distinction needs to be made between exonyms and endonyms. Exonyms are names for places, peoples and languages used by foreigners as opposed to endonyms, which are the native-language versions. Germany, for example, is the English exonym for the country, whose own people call it by its endonym, Deutschland.