While writing my amazing post about unused states' names, I remembered a question that has been consuming my free time. Where did Japan get its name when they refer to them selves as Nippon?
A nother name question
- Thread starter American_Samurai
- Start date
Grey Wolf
Donor
American_Samurai said:
I don't know
But Korea always referred to itself as Chosen (cho-sen) or as the Yi kingdom, and never as Korea
I don't even know if China calls itself China, and not simply Chung Kuo at least in imperial times
Germany does not name itself after the Germani, or even after the Allemani (as in Allemagne in French for Germany)
Switzerland does not call itself Switzerland, but Helvetia
Greece does not call itself Greece but (H)Ellas
The Ottoman Empire never called itself Turkey...or even the Ottoman Empire, I think
Grey Wolf
Leo Caesius
Banned
Marco Polo refered to Japan as Cipangu. I think that's a bad transliteration of Mandarin Ri ben guo (Ri as in "sun" and ben as in the counting word for books; guo means country). Mandarin /r/ is pronounced like the /r/ in Dvorak. So the modern pronunciation is something like "zhibun." Japan may come from the same Chinese name.
It is very common in the world, that people are called by names given by their neighbouring people. Eskimo, Apache are probably the most famous.
The Greek were a similar case. The romans were joking about the greeks as weaklings, who rather think theories but to have a nice fight. The fact, that nearly all romans had greek teachers nurtured this sight of the reality.
So, the Hellenists were called to be greacorums, meaning sort of creeping people.
In German the similarity is even clearer: greeks-Griechen to creep-kriechen.
This is an information I got from my Latin teacher in school some years ago-please do not blame me if it’s wrong.
Furthermore I could imagine that the difference between Nippon and Japan is due to pronunciation. The Japanese tend to sort of scream sometimes and especially NIPPON sounds like a barking dog. So it is not far from JAPAN. I’ll look that up.
The Greek were a similar case. The romans were joking about the greeks as weaklings, who rather think theories but to have a nice fight. The fact, that nearly all romans had greek teachers nurtured this sight of the reality.
So, the Hellenists were called to be greacorums, meaning sort of creeping people.
In German the similarity is even clearer: greeks-Griechen to creep-kriechen.
This is an information I got from my Latin teacher in school some years ago-please do not blame me if it’s wrong.
Furthermore I could imagine that the difference between Nippon and Japan is due to pronunciation. The Japanese tend to sort of scream sometimes and especially NIPPON sounds like a barking dog. So it is not far from JAPAN. I’ll look that up.
Hendryk
Banned
Leo Caesius said:
Right on. The Japanese characters for their country's name were taken, along with much of the japanese written language, straight from China. In Japanese they pronounce "Nihon", in Mandarin Chinese "Riben" (pinyin transliteration, and it does sound something like "zhibun"). "Ri" is the sun, "ben" the root and, figuratively speaking, the origin or the dawn. So Japan does indeed mean "[land of] the rising sun", just as the Chinese name for China, Zhongguo, does mean "the middle kingdom".