I’m curious if anybody knows where the English names for certain countries came from?
How did we get Japan from Nihon, Korea from Hanguk, China from Zhong guo, etc？
Korea is from Goryeo which is the name of the dynasty that ruled large parts of korea for about 500 years. Japan came into English through Portuguese from a Chinese name. China again came from the Portuguese from their use of a word that’s believed to be Persian in origin, potentially from the Qin dynasty. Other countries like Germany or Egypt are from Latin and Greek names respectively, and somewhere like Burma ,now Myanmar, is from the name of their largest ethnic group.
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I am unsure what is Hokkien, maybe some sort of Chinese dialect?
By the way Japan is called Japonsko in Czech.
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It’s a chinese language. When it comes to it being a dialect, as far as I’m aware it has it’s own seperate history and isn’t mutually inteligible with Mandarin for example.
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By the way, Dutch “japan” looks like English “japan”, but sounds more like ヤパン. I wonder if calling Japan “arrow-bread” would be a good pun or a disagreeable pun.
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