I was working at the U.N. and one day someone came in to the office with a long-standing family recipe they’d made the day before, to share. When asked what it was, she said “Bur…Myanmar tea cake”, because that morning, it was made official that the U.N. was accepting Myanmar’s new version of the country name, instead of Burma (which is how anyone alive at that point had ever known the country to be called).
She corrected herself so quickly because at the U.N. you are not allowed to make a mistake like that, even if your recipe has been handed down in the family as “Burmese tea cake”.
I have no idea how to do it in Windows, but in Linux (at least in Mint with Cinnamon) I use Ctrl + Shift + U, then 00F1 and enter: ñ. I suspect Windows has something equivalent. If it’s a combination you use a lot, but not enough to actually set up a language switch, you get used to it quickly enough. (I had to look up the C1 code for ñ, but use degree ° often enough that I don’t need the reference.)
I set my Windows machine to use the English U.S. International keyboard, which has a bunch of things like ñ, ø, þ, ß, etc. I even got a set of US International keycap stickers to see which keys do what.
Actually, I took that and customized it so I could add some missing things like Hungarian diacriticals (such as ő with the long double accent), but that took a bit of finagling.
The English - U.S. International keyboard is easy to add in Language settings, IIRC. I used Microsoft’s keyboard editor app to create my custom layout.
On my Android phone, hold-pressing a key will pop up a variety of alternative diacriticals, which are good for a number of different languages. You can also add other language Google keyboards for things that the English one doesn’t include (like the ő I mentioned earlier).
I’m amused by the anecdote, and know very well that some organizations are like that, treating a name like “Burma” (and associated terms) as a global regex regardless of context. I’d still consider “Burmese tea cake” to be the name of the pastry and not actually a reference to the country. (“French fries” are not from France, English Muffins are not from England, etc.)
Chinese speakers have whole different place names for cities/places/regions in Japan based on how one pronounces the kanji used in the Japanese names as Chinese characters.
Hokkaido is (approximating with pinyin and not showing tones) “beihaidao”. Same bei as is in Beijing and, um, Taibei. (Though you probably see it written Wade-Giles style as “Taipei.”)
Or would sound similarish but different in Cantonese which uses the same characters but different sounds for the characters, oy.
The Peking/Beijing thing is just a question of romanization/orthography. If you understand the rules for Wade-Giles, you will see the former and understand it should be pronounced as “Beijing”.
Trouble is nobody understood the rules for Wade-Giles and just pronounced the letters as though it were some English word they’d just never seen before.
Reminds me of a trip I was on; the language instructor seated next to me on the plane explained that “Qatar” is one syllable (not like “Kotter,” nor “kə-TAR”)… According to him the “tr” is a single phoneme, like the “tch” in “catch.”
Just because the food doesn’t come from the named country doesn’t mean the name doesn’t refer to that country. French fries may not be from France but the word “French” in this case originally referred to the country, even if was a bit of a misnomer.
Given the absolute turkey that dictator Recep Tayyip Erdogan has done of running his country, I don’t particularly feel the need to go along with his insistence that everyone in the world use the Turkish spelling of Turkey.
Or to recognize when a speaker has a Beijing accent!
