Why do we call China,'China'?

[KeyserSoze]

If a door can be ajar, can a jar be a door?






KeyserSoze

 

[Fenixgoon]

named after the great Qin of china... Qin-Shihuangdi was his full name, i think. meant "first emperor"

 

[gunblade]

Originally posted by: Fenixgoon
named after the great Qin of china... Qin-Shihuangdi was his full name, i think. meant "first emperor"

Yingzheng is his name, he combined huang and di to be called Hunagdi since he thought his achievement rivaled the three Huang and five Di before him.

 

[Jzero]

Originally posted by: biostud666

Originally posted by: Vaerilis
Why do we call England England?

I don't know but in danish Eng=Meadow so England is Land of Meadows, named by the vikings

England is derived from the Anglo-Saxon people nation/tribes that settled there. It's presumably based on it being the land of the Angles, Angleland and eventually mutated to England.

 

[LordMorpheus]

zhongguo or hanguo is china

nippon is japan. They still call themselves the correct name, but they let westerns use what westerners are used to.

They don't call the USA the USA in china, its meiguo.

 

[Zee]

Originally posted by: saxguy
omg this thread actually contains knowledge!

abort! abort!

 

[Reikon]

My brain wasn't ready for this thead.

 

[Nebor]

Originally posted by: Lazee

Originally posted by: saxguy
omg this thread actually contains knowledge!

abort! abort!

We are at Defcon 1 people!

 

[Colt45]

germany - deutschland
greece - hellas
croatia - hrvatska


then ones that still have the same root,
rossiya
polska
ukraina
Lietuvos
hell - all of europe


and on and on and on.
this isnt limited to asia.

 

[LongCoolMother]

Originally posted by: MaxFusion16
it's riben

ditto. thats how it is in mandarin. but if you speak english and not mandarin, you would probably pronounce it "rye-ben" which is incorrect.

as for the name china. its what someone posted earlier. the qin dynasty was when "china" was one of the strongest in the world in military strength, and they called themselves chinese from that.

 

[Darien]

Originally posted by: Chu

Originally posted by: yukichigai
Yeah, I think the name "Japan" is based off of the Chinese words for Sun and Book, the two kanji characters which make up the word Nihon, the Japanese word for Japan. (Japanese and Chinese share kanji, the ideograms. Or as most of you know it, all them funny blocks of those there squiggly-lookin' lines. The meanings are usually the same, but the pronunciations are massively different.)

Ding! Two minor corrections. The Chinese charater for 'book' is also the same charater for origin. The charater came from a pictograph of a tree with the roots emphasied, and then later came to mean book since books were considered the origin of knowledge. Also, as for the Sun character, there is a lot of debate if it is to mean literally the Sun or the first emperor of japan, who used that character as his name.

-Chu

That's the same for Japanese. The character for book means source, root, etc. I'm not familiar with this debate on the first character. Isn't it some old joke that because Japan is the "land of the rising sun" (sun + source. go figure :laugh, the characters for china wound up becoming something like middle + country? the character for middle can also indicate "among." "chuka" (long u) can mean something like "middle kingdom." (so it can be interpreted that china is just another country among many others. )

 

[rudder]

Why do we park in our driveway and drive on the parkway?

 

[Eli]

Originally posted by: Bootprint

Originally posted by: Rudee
Why do we call an Orange a "Orange" but we don't call an Apple a "red"?

From wikipedia.org :

The fruit originated in India (some say Vietnam) and was called na rangi in Sanskrit. The na rangi or naranja was translated as "norange", and in English usage a norange was back-formed into the more acceptable an orange. The same thing happened in French and Italian, but in Spanish it is still naranja. (Not every language uses naranja as the root for their word; Dutch, for example, calls the fruit sinaasappel but calls the colour oranje.)


For apple?
So where'd it get the name "apple"? Likely from the Latin abella, the name of a Campanian town that was renowned for its orchards and whose fruits were likely carried to the Roman frontier in England...subsequently it became the Old English aeppel, which meant fruit, eyeball, anything round.

Quite interesting.

 

[AndrewR]

I often wonder why in the hell we use certain bizarre words for cities and countries -- bizarre in comparison to their actual names in the language of the people there. Nippon is one of those, with the people calling themselves Nihon (Nihongo being the language). Then there's the stuff in Europe -- Germany as opposed to Deutschland; Italy for Italia; Spain for Espana; Venice for Venezia; Rome for Roma; Hungarians for Magyar; the list goes on.

I realize that some are very close the actual words, but why the change at all? Is it REALLY hard to say "Roma" as opposed to "Rome"? I'd rather use the actual name so that if I happen to visit the country, I'm not asking for an unknown place.

Of course, it's not just done in English -- anyone here live in les Etats-Unis?