this post was submitted on 29 Jul 2024
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It's annoying when English names of countries are significantly different than what the countries call themselves. Besides China = Zhongguo, off the top of my head there's Japan = Nippon and Germany = Deutschland.
It's a thing in all languages, because not every language has all the sounds of every other language.
For example, in Chinese, Canada is Jianada, America is Meiguo, Brazil is Baxi, England is Yingguo.
My understanding is that Japan has a similar story as the European explorers who first made contact there were Portuguese and couldn't pronounce Nippon correctly.
Having a name that is an approximation of the native one is perfectly understandable, which it looks like all the Chinese examples are, but none of the ones I listed are at all. Zongo is probably how China would be transliterated in English, and Nippon and Dutchland are easy to say. of course, English has that problem of calling other people Dutch causing an issue with that last one. Sticking to the names that Portuguese explorers gave is where a lot of the weird English ones come from.
Zh is a J sound. It would be more like Jong Go
Ah, yeah, that sounds better.
Nonetheless, there are examples of other languages besides English messing up the name of another country. Practically no two languages call Germany or The Netherlands the same thing, and almost none call them what they call themselves. I'm not making a value judgement about this phenomenon, just saying that it's not unique to English.
For another example, Japan's name comes from the Chinese word spelled with the same characters, but it's pronounced completely differently in Chinese.
Oh, sure, other languages do the same. It's annoying when anyone does it!
i mean everyone has a different name for germany though: france says allemagne after the tribe that was closest to them, the romans said germania after the tribe that was closest to them (and that's where english gets it from), poland says "niemcy" because they considered german to be utter nonsense speech, and german-speaking countries say some variation on "deutschland" meaning land of the people.
exonyms and endonyms are a part of all languages, it just depends on when and how a language started caring about said country/city. Hence why you generally only have exonyms for the largest cities of countries, that's what anyone outside the country cares about.