Ask Hexbear is the place to ask and answer ~~thought-provoking~~ questions.
Rules:
Posts must ask a question.
If the question asked is serious, answer seriously.
Questions where you want to learn more about socialism are allowed, but questions in bad faith are not.
Try !feedback@hexbear.net if you're having questions about regarding moderation, site policy, the site itself, development, volunteering or the mod team.
When the king of Swaziland changed the name of his country to Eswatini back in 2018, the Communist Party of Swaziland called it out as a populist distraction and continued to use the colonial name while demanding real change.
http://www.solidnet.org/article/ba5f172f-e2d7-11e8-a7f8-42723ed76c54/
So I think the question should be, what are Indian communists calling their country? How do they feel about the various names?
the Communist Party of Swaziland called it out as a populist distraction ... while demanding real change
Completely understandable, of course the name of the country matters little compared to material conditions.
... and continued to use the colonial name ...
But why? Like yeah the above is true, but how does that mean it's bad to move to the native name instead of the colonizer name?
Side note: it should technically be "eSwatini", but annoyingly no one — not even the eSwatini government — uses that spelling.
Technically in what way? If you're writing the name in English, it still exists in the context of English grammatical rules even if the word is not English in origin.
called it out as a populist distraction [by extremely unpopular right wing governments]
exactly what happened with Iran & Myanmar, lol
Officially, it’s both. Culturally, there’s those two, plus Hindustan. You can call it whatever. Bharat is being championed by the Hindu-right as the only official/indigenous name. So you might want to steer clear of that for those reasons.
That's up to them, I think. There's precedent for countries changing their official English names.
See Czech Republic -> Czechia and Turkey -> Turkiye
Yeah, but at the same time those name changes aren't very well respected by westerners.
Turkiye seems to be getting standard very quickly
Why did 🇹🇷 change the spelling anyway? It's pronounced the same lol
I don't think it is
I mean, one would expect younger americans to eventually pronounce it Tur-kee-yeh.
It's kind of weird how the west respects eSwatini (well, "Eswatini") more than it respects Czechia.
Eswatini is more respected than Czechia which is more respected than Türkiye. Chinese people are referred to in Chinese name order, but Japanese people are referred to in Western name order. Pinyin is finally used by Americans but they omit the tone marks. We really are all over the place...
which is more respected than Türkiye
Pinyin is finally used by Americans but they omit the tone marks.
I think keyboards really affect our usage of accent marks. It's a lot easier to type without the accent. Especially on a physical (English QWERTY at least) keyboard there's no way to type the accents other than remembering the alt codes. Touch screen keyboards definitely help by making it pretty easy, but I think the largest effect would come from autocorrect changing it by default. I think there's also a bit of a stigma that makes going out of your way to use the proper accent seem "pretentious", which autocorrect would also help with.
You don't need to use alt codes.
ãâäåáà, êëéè, îïíì, õôöòø, ûüúù, æ, þð, ñ, ýÿ, ç
Behold, you can type all these and probably a few more by just combining two keys or in some cases three (a little more annoying than capitalizing) and using the English United States International Keyboard layout on a Microsoft keyboard... And how do you think French people write in French? They have to procure diacritics as well. The input is basically the same as how I do it, except their physical keyboards also have the markings on them so you don't need to memorize it all in your head.
https://www.starr.net/is/type/intlchart.html
Literally all Microsoft has to do is extend this keyboard layout and it would be able to handle more languages.
edit: why is this a video lmao
Also it's already bad enough figuring out a Chinese word with just the pinyin. If you're not even given tones then there could be dozens of meanings.
That's not the default layout for most and it causes trouble when wanting to use those symbols on their own, which would be much more often than typing diacritics.
Okay sorry, let me clarify something. It's okay for the layperson to omit accents. My issue is that it's considered acceptable in government papers, academic articles, books, etc.
I’ve never met any Indians who referred to their country as anything but India when speaking in English. So if they’re not doing it, I - a non-Indian - will not try to one up them for no reason lol
Like some native Americans prefer to be called Indian, some prefer their specific tribal name, some want xyz. I’m not going to just say “uhmm actually it’s indigenous American, not Indian.” Or vice versa
Your guns go peru peru, my guns go BHARAT BHARAT :
: :
As an Indian I use India because the whole 'Bharat' thing is just a propaganda campaign by the bjp. Although it's also the legal alternate name of the country so you can use it.
If the name does change I hope the more principled transliteration of 婆羅多 gets used in Chinese.
India because then Hindutvas will out themselves to "correct" you
AFAIK, the use of Bharat is considered to be a form linguistic imperialism foisted by the plains-dwellers upon the rest of the country.
I'd call 'em any, depending on which crowd I'm referring that likes either or both names...
