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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.

Not_mikey@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

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.

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e0qdk@reddthat.com ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

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.

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- tigeruppercut@lemmy.zip ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
  
  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
  
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DeathByBigSad@sh.itjust.works ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

I think and the US is 米国 meaning rice country.

Lmfao, pretty sure that’s the Chinese Nationalists’ internet term for it, it’s not the real translation, its some homophone thing, nobody says that IRL

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