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Comment on Transliterated country names into Chinese Language use pre-existing characters that already has its own meaning, therefore native Chinese speakers have a subconcious impression based on country names.

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tourist@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

Interesting thought

I don’t think the other nations are too bothered by it in most cases.

The country that comes to mind first is Germany. They call it Deutschland. I never looked into why we as English speakers call it “Germany”. I just do it because everyone else does.

I haven’t heard of Germans getting upset about it. If they were legitimately offended, I’d start calling it Deutschland, no problem.

The real issues come in when there’s a historical context. Like, if the name contains a slur for the people in that nation. Or if you mix up the names of neighbouring Balkan countries.

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ChairmanMeow@programming.dev ⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
IIRC Germany > Germania > Allemania > Alemanic tribes, people who lived in Germany. France calls them “Allemagne” as well, you can see where that came from.

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- squaresinger@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
  Germany used to be a collection of tribes and depending on which of these tribes the countries around them had contact with that’s the name that stuck in that language.
  
  Germans call themselves Deutsche (from diutisc meaning “the people” in Old German)
  
  In French they are called Allemagne after the Alamanni tribe
  
  In Italian it’s Germania, same as the English Germany, from the ancient latin Germania with unknown origins
  
  In Finnish it’s Saksa, after the Saxon tribes
  
  Most slavic countries use some variant of Niemcy, which means “speechless”, because slavic and germanic languages have hardly anything in common and are thus unintelligible to each other.
  
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- foggy@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
  Yeah, many Western European maps still refer to it as Alemania, which in beer contexts is quite a hoot :)
  
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