Exonym and Endonym - Orthographic Exonymy in Languages With Phonetic Spelling

Orthographic Exonymy in Languages With Phonetic Spelling

There are a few languages in Europe in which the use of seeming exonyms (in terms of spelling but not necessarily pronunciation) for places and people is actually the norm and not an exception: Latvian, Lithuanian, Turkish, Azerbaijani and Serbian (when written in Roman script), all having Latin-based script, transcribe foreign proper names whenever necessary, including those originally written in Latin script. The reasons are the respective nations' preference for their own consistent phonetic spelling and the need to add native inflectional endings to most nouns. The resulting advantage is that reading and spelling in these languages remain easy (knowledge of how to spell any unadapted foreign words is not required); a disadvantage is that foreigners may erroneously complain that their names have been "misspelled".

The phonetic transcription is often more correct: e.g., Varšava, Varšuva, Varšava, Varşova, Varşava (in Latvian, Lithuanian, Serbian, Turkish, and Azerbaijani, respectively), with and, is phonetically closer to the original Polish Warszawa than the English Warsaw . (The sound is usually perceived as closer to than by speakers of languages with those two sounds but not .) However, such spellings may also reveal widespread ignorance of the way a place name is actually pronounced: e.g., Çikaqo, Ĉikago, Čikāga, Čikaga, Čikago (in Azerbaijani, Esperanto, Latvian, Lithuanian, and Serbian, respectively), which misinterpret the English orthographic ch in the city of Chicago as phonetic .