Maybe it's just the heat getting to me, but I've been thinking. We Americans have names for places in the world and we assume this is just the way it is. Now, I'm realizing we don't call places what the people who live there call places and things. Here are a few examples:
....we say DANUBE RIVER but in Hungary it is called DUNA, in Romania DUNARE.... it flows through both places, but not thru America.... so why don't we call it at least one of those names. Nobody here calls it Danube. Why do we??
...we say HUNGARY but Hungarians call it MAGYAR. If this is their name for their country, why do we call it something else? Romanians call it UNGARIA. A little like us, but.....
...we say BUCHAREST, but in Romanian it is BUCURESTI. By the way, "bucur" means "joyful."
...we say POLAND, and the Poles say POLSKI
An interesting note: as a rule all country names must end in "a" in Romanian.... UNGARIA, POLANDA, OLANDA (Holland), GERMANIA, GRECIA (Greece), JAPONA, ITALIA...
I could go on forever, but maybe you get the point. Language is a tricky thing. Maybe it all goes back to that whole TOWER OF BABEL business.
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