Example:
USA 美国 - 美 mean “beautiful” and 国 is “country”
So when my mom told me we were going to move to 美国, I, having never heard of anything about this country ever before, already had a positive impression of this “beautiful country”.
France 法国 - 法 is one of the characters in 法律, law, so my first impression was, that these people probably have very strict rules and are law abiders
Britain/UK 英国 - 英 is one of the characters in 英雄, hero, so I just imagine British people like to help the innocent (this was before I learned about British colonialism lol, but I guess the 英 character still sort of partly relevent, as in they view themselves as “hero”, aka: they interfere with other’s countries bussiness a lot)
Germany 德国 - 德 is one of the characters in 道德, morality, so I had a subconcious belief they were very moral people. I didn’t even know about the holocaust yet. 💀
Mexico 墨西哥 - 墨 is ink, 哥 is brother, so I though these are dark-skinned people that value brotherhood, masculinity.
South Korea 韩国 - 韩 sounds like 寒, so I just assumed it was a very cold country (isn’t it tho?) Oh BTW, I was in South Korea… in the airport waiting for a transfer flight, never actually entered the country for real, that was 15 years go, the closest I’ve ever been to South Korea. Wanna go there someday, see the snow (cuz its a 寒国 “cold country” remember xD)
Japan 日本 - 日 is the sun, so I thought it gets like very sunny or something
These are the few on the top of my head. You can mention any below and I can tell you what my “subconcious feel” about the name is.
Mexico is actually right
Also there’s 非洲 - meaning the “non-continent” directly translated. It’s what they’ve named Africa.
This is also a huge problem when deciding how to write foreign names into Chinese: imagine the difference in public perspective when reading a news article about some country leader named “Prime Minister Sleepy Swamp Pit” vs “Prime Minister Strong Universe Zephyr” or whatever.
I Remember a decade ago i read a post on blogpost on exactly this
I wasted thirty minutes to search but I didn’t find it, but it was something like Michael Jackson was shocked to learn during his First tour in mainland china that the locals gave him the Hanzi 迈克尔·杰克逊 where the last character means “inferior” or something like that, instead in Taiwan the locals chose 麦可·杰克森 which has a better meaning.
When I studied Chinese our teachers basically took the first two letters of every student’s first & last names and associated it with pinyin & corresponding Chinese characters. So my Chinese name became Horse Angel.
Glorious Leader Tiny Sweat Hands
What’s Bulgaria? This is what translate spits out: 保加利亚
Afaik, some characters do have meanings but are sometimes used for their readings, so their literal meaning is gibberish.
保 — to protect — bǎo
加 — to add — jiā
利 — benefit, profit — lì
亚 — Asia / secondary — yà
I think this is part of why some people end up with weird gibberish tattoos when they translate things literally, because some made up alphabets try to map Western letters to some Chinese characters, but it doesn’t work that way.
Interesting, Japan does a similar thing I think and the US is 米国 meaning rice country. Which sort of makes sense since the US has always had a huge agricultural / grain surplus. I wonder if the japanese think / know we’re fat because of the name.
Also england/ UK is the same 英国 as above so maybe they learned about them from the Chinese whereas they independently learned about the US and gave it a different name.
Which sort of makes sense since the US has always had a huge agricultural / grain surplus.
米国 is because of ateji, not agriculture. 米 is the second character of 亜米利加 – an old transliteration of “a-me-ri-ka” as kanji. 亜 is the shorthand for Asia (亜細亜); the second character 米 is used as the shorthand for America. 米 is both the country (USA) and the continents – e.g. 北米 and 南米 are sometimes used for North and South America, respectively, while 米軍 is the US military.
Katakana has mostly replaced kanji transliteration of foreign words in modern Japanese, but some uses like the 米 shorthand persist.
米 is the second character of 亜米利加
I wonder why it became beikoku instead of mekoku when it got shortened to 米国. I’m glad language learners at least don’t have to deal with ateji anymore. What a nightmare.
I think and the US is 米国 meaning rice country.
Lmfao, pretty sure that’s also the Chinese Nationalists’ internet term for it
From what I read, a lot of these character choices (with the exception of Japan/Korea, they might have chosen those themselves) were made with the dual considerations of being similar sounding to the country name and the hanzi’s meaning being flattering to the people of the country. And there are plenty of country names that are entirely phonetic (e.g. 意大利 for Italy or 澳大利亚 for Australia, Mexico, etc.).
Japan definitely chose it themselves. Before, the country was known as 倭国, with 倭 meaning something like harmonic but also submissive. Obviously one Tennō wasn’t too happy about that and began signing letters to the Chinese court as “from the ruler of the land where the sun rises (日本) to the ruler of the land where the sun sets.” So Japan became the “Land of the rising sun” (well literally it’s the “sun’s origin”).
Most of those do make sense from a 19th century or older viewpoint, so I suspect that it’s not just a coincidence that those words were linked to those countries. If it was only one or a few with an ulterior meaning, then I could believe it to be a coincidence, but it’s most of them. I more believe that there were chinese word artists at work who looked for words with both a fitting meaning and the right sound.
When it comes to nature, the USA is a really beautiful country. France gave the world the Code Napoléon, which is one of the most influential evolutions in law systems. Britain’s success in it’s colonies and in the industrial revolution was very often based on the endeavours of individuals, ie heroes. Northern Germans are sticklers for following rules, politeness etc (which was back then viewed very positively by others, but has since become a bit tainted because an attitude of the law is the law will often lead to inhumanity). Mexico: not a clue. Korea: I just have vague guesses. Japan, when seen from northern China, is where the sun rises.
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Interesting. In Japanese, we have the concept of ateji, where we just put Chinese characters for the sound so we just know not to take the meanings so literally. But we do tend to pick nice or neutral-sounding characters. i.e. we wouldn’t use characters like 死 or 糞 for the sound lol. This is the same for peoples’ names.
Czech Republic?
Edit: And also Czechslovakia, and Slovakia, maybe. I’d love to hear whether there is connection between the names.
This is fascinating! Thank you for posting
The Netherlands (荷蘭), obviously is something with flowers. Google translate tells me 蘭 means “orchid”. Also the sound “Hèlán” is fairly close to how the natives pronounce “Nederland”.
‘Holland’ as some use for ‘the Netherlands’ is a bit of a pars pro toto as Holland is a province of the Netherlands. Is just the most well known part, and more easier pronounce with one/two syllables (depending on how well you’re articulating).
Thanks for the etymology btw I was curious about it when I read the op.
I mean the Mexico one doesn’t sound too terribly far off from reality lol. Neither does Britain, with the the last sentence especially.
In all seriousness, this is a very interesting post. It’s very cool to see what other languages call other countries and what it means.
Interestingly I’ve heard Japan called “the land of the rising sun” due to being one of the farthest east on the Mercator projection which despite its few features and many flaws is often considered the standard of map projections.
Better than “dipshit”.
The characters for Japan literally mean sun and origin. And has been in use since the 8th century. So the Mercator projection has nothing to do with that. The origin of “land of the rising sun” is because Japan is East of China and the sun rises in the east.
For sure, and the Pacific Ocean is vast. So you go East and find Japan, and then for a long time it’s understood that there’s nothing off Japan’s east coast, and they’re the eastern edge of the world. So they’re the land of the rising sun. Seems fair!
We do call it that in German as well, I mean, not colloquially, but it’s used in literature or poetry.
There are Mercator projection maps with the Americas in the center and Japan on the left edge of the map.
Most maps, regardless of projection used, cut the world through the pacific because there’s barely any land. World maps centering the Americas cut through Central Asia, making them less practical for many applications.
All map projections try to flatten a curved surface. That only works with cuts and distortions. They are all trade-offs between conserving area, angles, shapes, distances. It’s impossible to to all of that.
India is ‘stamp limit’?
Maybe Xuanzang was annoyed by how expensive it was to send letters home.
