Board 8 > Something I've always been curious about (Country names).

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I'm totally ignorant on this and curious if someone can educate me...

Why don't Americans, or whatever other countries do this as well, call other countries the name their residents do?

Examples... Deutschland is called Germany, Nippon is called Japan, etc...

I feel like it's a lot like if your name was Randolph, but everyone called you Peter.

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I blame Switzerland, the IOC, and the Olympics.

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I believe Portugal is responsible for "Japan." I don't know exactly how it got morphed to that extent, though.

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That's a great question I do not know the answer to.

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http://www.streetsmartlanguagelearning.com/2009/01/why-do-we-call-japan.html?m=1

Quick Google because I don't actually know.

Seems like it is just a really long and ancient game of telephone that stuck

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Ancient Rome is the answer a lot of times.

Greece is derived from the name the Romans used to call the Greeks, even though they call their country

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I just figured modern times would have adjusted accordingly.

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BakusaiTenketsu posted...

I just figured modern times would have adjusted accordingly.

You overestimate people

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UltimaterializerX posted...

I really came into this topic expecting you to wonder why southern girls all have Lynn after their name.

i came in expecting him to ask why southern boys always go by their middle names

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It has a lot to do with different languages and and historical context as well. For example, South Koreans call South Korea Hanguk but in English we obviously use Korea which is derived from Goryeo, the name of the older kingdom. So in this case the older name just stuck around.

It's inconsistent in other languages too. For example a bunch of Asian countries like Korea, Japan, and Vietnam have country names that use Chinese characters. In Japanese you might pronounce it Nippon or Nihon, but in Mandarin you'd pronounce it Riben and in Cantonese you'd say Jatbun because that's just how you pronounce those characters.

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Is it not just an ignorance thing? I think Americans in general don't care or pay attention to other countries much. Most of the people I know around here wouldn't even be able to tell you where any of these countries are located.

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Yeah, a pretty big part is how those other countries get introduced to the populace. It's easier to see in hindsight that other nations have their own names, but centuries ago we probably hear a nation's name as filtered by their contemporaries. It's a big game of telephone.

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CassandraCain posted...

Is it not just an ignorance thing?

no

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BlackDra90n posted...

It's inconsistent in other languages too. For example a bunch of Asian countries like Korea, Japan, and Vietnam have country names that use Chinese characters. In Japanese you might pronounce it Nippon or Nihon, but in Mandarin you'd pronounce it Riben and in Cantonese you'd say Jatbun because that's just how you pronounce those characters.

Yeah this is the best answer really. Don't forget lots of languages have lots of sounds and no languages have all the sounds

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Because this is how it goes! But the real answer is that most languages are different so you can't do that.

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I think about this all the time. It exists the other way too - in Japanese, the UK is called igirisu, derived from the Portuguese word for the English IIRC.

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