Country Names

Discussion in 'Linguistics' started by Thoreau, Jul 1, 2009.

  1. Thoreau Valued Senior Member

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    I am curious. In Germany, the Germans call it Deutchland yet we here in America call it "Germany". What other countries do we call by one name that those from them have another name?
     
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  3. nietzschefan Thread Killer Valued Senior Member

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    It's a good point, I think they should use native names for countries. This is a hold over from Pompous englishness that has managed to survive with pompous anglophones.
     
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  5. Xylene Valued Senior Member

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    New Zealand has an interesting naming-history; When Abel Tasman came by in 1642, he named the country Niuew Zeeland, after his native province in the Netherlands. The Dutch having a bad report of the place from Abel Tasman, they never came back and made no claim on the place so far as I know; so that was the name it bore on maps from then on, until 1769, when James Cook came down here and claimed the country for Britain. In that year, D'Surville came down and claimed the place for France as well, but Cook's claim was made shortly before D'Surville's, so the country became a colony of Britain. The name was anglicised to New Zealand by Cook.

    Much later, during the 19th Century, the Maori name Aotearoa came into use; it was the Maori version of the name 'Land of the Long White Cloud' (Ao 'cloud' tea 'white' roa 'long'). The Land of the Long White Cloud was the name of a book by William Pember Reeves, a poet and novelist; it was never the Maori name for the country, because although the tribes had a fairly good knowledge of the layout of the two islands (being inveterate travellers in order to fight or trade with each other) they all thought only in terms of their own rohe (tribal district) rather than the country as a whole. So it's only in the late 20th century that the name Aotearoa become synonymous with New Zealand among the Maoris.
     
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  7. Pandaemoni Valued Senior Member

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    And the

    (i) the French call it Allemagne
    (ii) the Finnish call it Saksa and
    (iii) in Czech, it's Nemecko

    The German version "Deutschland" means "land of the people" or somesuch. The English word "Germany" comes from the Latin word for the region, Germania and that word existed well before there was a nation to call Deutschland. The French, Finnish and Czech words for it all come from specific German tribes that presumably had some importance to the early local language makers, specifically the Alemanni, Saxon and Nemeti tribes.
     
    Last edited: Jul 2, 2009
  8. Tyler Registered Senior Member

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    China in Chinese is called 中国 pronounced "Zhong Guo" (the 'guo' sounds kind of like "gua" I guess). Interestingly enough, in Chinese Germany is referred to as 德国 pronounced "De Guo" and meaning "the moral nation".
     
  9. PieAreSquared Woo is resistant to reason Registered Senior Member

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    Interestingly enough, in Chinese Germany is referred to as 德国 pronounced "De Guo" and meaning "the moral nation".

    Certainly compared to Japan

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  10. UltiTruth In pursuit... Registered Senior Member

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    India = Bharat = Hindusthan
     
  11. codanblad a love of bridges Registered Senior Member

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    americans call australia "ohz-trey-lee-ah" whereas australians call it "strayl-yah". the british call it "that dirty place where those convicts live".

    japan is called nihon or nippon in japan, they call australia "o-su-toh-ray-ree-a", cos that's the closest they could get. they also do their best to use the inhabitants language for france: fue-ran-sue and deutschland: doi-tsu, but do a good job of America: A-meh-ree-ka and Spain: sue-pay-n(the ue is hardly pronounced, so its does sound like spain), although they broke the rule here given spaniards call it espana. they got lazy i guess.
     
  12. kevinalm Registered Senior Member

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    Swedish for Sweden is Sverige. And it's not pronounced like an English speaker would suspect. One, it's a soft swedish g which is close to an english y as in yellow. Two, it's three syllables. Something like:

    sver-ee-ya

    First syllable e short and final a shwa. A better rendering into english might be Sveria, which english speakers would pronounce pretty close to correct.
     
  13. Giambattista sssssssssssssssssssssssss sssss Valued Senior Member

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    Finland is Suomi, I believe.

     
  14. Xylene Valued Senior Member

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    The name Peru came from the tribal name Viru.
     
  15. Thoreau Valued Senior Member

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    LOL! Thanks for making me spew my water all on my laptop. :roflmao:
     
  16. Sciencelovah Registered Senior Member

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    Not Deutchland, but Deutschland. My people (Indonesian) call it Jerman. Chilean people whom I met last year call it Alemania.

    We (Indonesian) call your country Amerika. We call Japan as Jepang. We call the Netherlands as Belanda. We call England as Inggris.
     
  17. Sciencelovah Registered Senior Member

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    Ok, here are some more list of what other countries are called in my language (Indonesian):

    Egypt: Mesir
    Papua New Guinea: Papua Nugini
    France: Perancis
    Greece: Yunani
    Iceland: Islandia
    Ireland: Irlandia
    Singapore: Singapura
    Papua New Guinea: Papua Nugini
    Philippines: Filipina
    South Afrika: Afrika Selatan
     
  18. Oli Heute der Enteteich... Registered Senior Member

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    Papua New Guinea - so good you named it twice?

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  19. Sciencelovah Registered Senior Member

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    Actually, we call it not only Papua Nugini, but also Papua Guinea Baru

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    Gotta catch my train, c ya Oli! >.>
     
  20. Fraggle Rocker Staff Member

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    Hungary = Magyarorszag, Finland = Suomi, Albania = Shqiperi, Greece = Hellas, Georgia = Sakartvelo. Until recently, Bohemia = Čechy (now the Czech Republic). And those are just (more or less) European countries. When you get into the other continents the discrepancies are even more common.

    The usual reason for this is that a country can acquire multiple names at different times in its history, and the names may reflect the people who were living there at the time or a political entity. For example, the Bohumil were a Celtic tribe who lived in what is now Bohemia during Roman times; the ancestors of the Slavic people who live there now displaced them a couple of centuries later. Similarly, the Huns (Attila's people) migrated to what is now Hungary in ancient times; the Magyars replaced them about a thousand years later.

    The Franks and the Alle Manner (literally "all people") were two Germanic tribes who each got a country named after them. Another Germanic tribe who got a country named after them were the Angles, who migrated to Britannia when the Roman Empire collapsed and established Angle Land. The Saxons came with them, and they still have a place named after themselves in Germany. To this day "England" has several counties named Wessex, etc., which is an elision of "West Saxony," and also East Anglia.

    Germania is a Latin word meaning "related people," and the origin of its use for the Germanic tribes collectively is obscure.

    Island, "Iceland," is perhaps the most logically named country.
    The Chinese name Western countries by taking the first accented syllable of their native name and transcribing it with a Chinese word that comes as close as possible to the original pronunciation, given the vast disparity in phonetics. Since every syllable has a great many homonyms it's usually no problem picking one that has an honorable meaning. America is Mei guo, "beautiful country;" England is Ying guo, "country of the eagle."

    The Chinese name for their own country, Zhong guo literally means "center country," since they felt that everything and everyone else was peripheral. Today they call almost all foreigners outside of East Asia xi ren, "Western people." They named Japan Ri ben, "root of the sun," since from their perspective that's where the sun rises. The Japanese adopted that name during the centuries-long process of adopting Chinese culture, although in modern Japanese the syllables are now pronounced Ni hon.
     
  21. Oli Heute der Enteteich... Registered Senior Member

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    Just sticking with the UK, re Essex/ Sussex/ Wessex.
    Wales is called Cymru in Welsh, Wales itself meaning (roughly) "foreigners".
    In fact in England there are numerous town and villages with the Walesby (or variations thereof), deriving from (I think) the Saxon waelsa = foreign, attesting to how often "we" were overrun by outsiders: they had the cheek to declare towns that still had the original population living there as "foreign"!

    AFAIK waelsa is also responsible for Wallachia (part of Romania), where the real Vlad (Dracula) Drakul came from.
     
  22. Fraggle Rocker Staff Member

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    The Wikipedia article on Wales is a little sloppy on the etymology of the name, but it appears to be derived from an old Germanic word meaning "Romanized foreigner," and was used by the Anglo-Saxons specifically for the Celtic tribes in the British Isles who were the survivors of the civilization imposed by the Romans. It also shows up in the name "Cornwall."

    The Germanic people on the continent used the same word in their language to refer to Wallonia and the Walloons, the French-speaking ("Romanized") people in what is now Belgium. The early Slavic migrants to Europe borrowed the word from their German neighbors to name Wallachia, a Catholic ("Romanized") area in their Eastern Orthodox region.
     
  23. Oli Heute der Enteteich... Registered Senior Member

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    I did read that, but the "Walesby" was related to me by my architecture tutor (of all people)...
     

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