Comment on "United States" in French (États-Unis) would have made a very confusing acronym
Lost_My_Mind@lemmy.world 2 days agoJapan? AnimeLand
Comment on "United States" in French (États-Unis) would have made a very confusing acronym
Lost_My_Mind@lemmy.world 2 days agoJapan? AnimeLand
spankinspinach@sh.itjust.works 2 days ago
I learned not that long ago the Japanese refer to Japan as Nippon, and that stuck with me
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Names_of_Japan
tigeruppercut@lemmy.zip 1 day ago
They usually say Nihon instead of Nippon.
Some English used to use words derived from nippon as well but they mostly dropped out of the language not too long after WWII, prob bc nip is an old slur for Japanese people. There’s an ee cummings poem that refers to a piece of “nipponized steel”.
allpoetry.com/…/13587560-plato-told-by-e.e.-cummi…
spankinspinach@sh.itjust.works 16 hours ago
Son of a gun, cool! Do you happen to know if it was a transliterative swap (I’m not sure if that’s what it could be called), where Nippon and Nihon actually sound similar enough if your native language is Japanese?
tigeruppercut@lemmy.zip 1 hour ago
I’m not entirely sure about how the pronunciations developed. I know that in modern Japanese there are only certain ways syllables can change their sound. Japan uses a syllabary rather than an alphabet, so for example they can only say the sounds bu and ra, but never “bra” because they don’t have a standalone “b”. Their syllables get modified in predictable ways, like ka can change to ga, going from a voiceless to voiced velar stop. In much the same way, the ho syllable can become po.
I don’t know much about the history of when nippon became nihon, but the article you linked has a short section on it