How do you speak to the world in Catalan? Well, fixing the place names of the whole world in this language. Place names are place names and their version in another language that is not that of the territory where that place is located are exonyms. That is, while in English it is New York (place name), in Catalan it is Nova York (exonym in Catalan). But I wish all exonyms were that easy to pin down.
In 2015, the Philological Section of the Institut d'Estudis Catalans, on behalf of the Cartographic and Geological Institute of Catalonia and the Commission of Toponymy of Catalonia, began to prepare the World Nomenclature, which was presented today at the IEC headquarters and which contains 8,500 exonyms. That is, countries, capitals and large cities, regions, relevant geographical features, etc., from more than 200 countries: the world in Catalan.
Enric Ribas, who has been one of the architects in charge of the name day office, gave some details of the complexity of this task, especially when it comes to place names that have no tradition in Catalan and come from languages that do not use the Latin alphabet. .
Or cases like Ukraine, where the influence of Russian in Eastern European countries has led to the exonyms reaching Catalan through this language (Kiev), instead of the Ukrainian form (Kiv). A case similar to what has happened in the Arab countries with the languages of colonization, such as English and French.
The website of the World Nomenclator, with maps and the different variants of the same toponym to facilitate your search, has been available since yesterday on the language resources page of the IEC: Nomenclator-mundial.iec.cat.
Catalan version, here
