[tomerv]

Follow-up question: what if other countries follow suit, especially ones that don't use a Latin-based alphabet? Egypt is formally called "جمهورية مصر العربية" in its native language - should that be recorded as the ISO Full name for EG?

[Gibbon1]

I think Egypt should be forced to revert to hieroglyphs.

[elashri]

Actually the name "Egypt" comes from the Greek pronunciation of the ancient Egyptian capital Memphis ( at least for most of the time it was).

The current official name is "Junhuriyah Misr al-Arabiyah" which is Arab Republic of Egypt in English. This is not something special. a lot of countries have something like "republic of" in their names.

[thaumasiotes]

> a lot of countries have something like "republic of" in their names.

Well, that depends. The name for China the administrative region is 中华人民共和国, but I wouldn't really want to call that the name of the country. That's 中国, and if a regime change occurred, the name of the country would still be 中国, even if the name of the government were no longer 中华人民共和国.

[jhbadger]

Yeah, numerous Communist regimes have/had either "People's" or "Democratic" (or in the case of North Korea, both) in their names. Normally when the Communist regime fell, this was removed,but the main part of the name preserved.

[int_19h]

It's not strictly a Soviet thing. When Ukraine declared its independence from Russia back in 1917, it was as "Ukrainian People's Republic", but it was definitely not communist or even particularly socialist. Ditto "Belarusian People's Republic". As I understand, in both cases the intent was to convey that it is a nation-state of the people that inhabit it, and not a part of a large empire anymore.

[zen_1]

We'd need to touch up our school curriculum (well, even more than we already do).