Note: for any future commotion, this was supposed to be purely educational. Okay the question should be why do countries have to do this and why is it so hard not to? Wouldn’t it make sense to add this to the list of things the youth can learn at an early age?
Why can’t they just allow kids in schools to learn the true names of things no matter how hard they may be to pronounce? I understand the difficulty but computers and the Internet exist so we can translate and better implement this. Like some words in English where we have no single word translation like ‘Dejavu’ (pardon non autocorrect), I understand. But places were changed to make it easier to produce in a native tongue. I am sure it is not only America, or English, but wouldn’t we be better off respecting the culture and not changing the name, like we changed our map to the correct pronunciation of Turkey (Türkiye). So why don’t we change everything back to how the countries’ place names are pronounced by their citizens out of respect? We can learn how to pronounce things better. Would it make things harder or would it allow us to grow? I am genuinely curious.
Note: I understand some people won’t be able to pronounce them but why did they decide it would be better for a country/language than to just try to pronounce them correctly.
Nobody sat down and made a decision to handle country names the way we do. It organically happened the way it did for no particular reason other than it works well enough.
Nobody cares enough to undertake this. I don’t particularly care that people call the US by different names in their languages. People in Turkey aren’t asking us to pronounce their country’s name the same way they do. Most people are happy to apply the inverse golden rule on this, i.e., I don’t pronounce your country’s name the way you do, so I’m not going to expect you to pronounce my country’s name the way I do.
Yes, but I think it would be a lot of work for not much growth. You don’t learn a lot about a place by just pronouncing its name differently.
This is clearly false. There was a definite point at which it was decided to call Burma Myanmar, or at a more local level Peking to Beijing.
Those were decisions to change the specific names of specific places, not a decision to handle country names in the general way OP was describing.
There were certain decisions made to specifically deviate from what had developed organically. These are the exception.