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.

• 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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