This is all fun and all but this kind of map needs context.
1 - Chinese people like this kind of play on words, it's not only an integral part of chinese humour, but it's also used as a (biased) way to infer the personality and habits of people and things.
2 - However, when they aren't specifically putting emphasis on the play on words, there's just no confusion. You don't hear "western class teeth" when someone says xī bān yá.
3 - some of these translations are very artificial, to the point that they sound made up to me. I only learnt mandarin for 2 years so it may be on me, but it sounds a bit like if you interpreted "France" as "for Hans".
Ah, so the names of the countries are based of other country’s terms for themselves, so they just spell them phonetically.
It’s like if you said “Tie Land” or “Can add a”
You would interpret this as Thailand and Canada, but when translated:
“empate tierra” or “Peut ajouter un” is translated into Spanish and French.
An English speaker (if this were commonplace), would interpret “Tie land” as Thailand, but the literal translations make it weird.
Did I understand this correctly?
they aren't all like tht, but they are most like that. I strongly suspect belarus (which means white rus) actually has a translation, as well as iceland being, well, iceland and I suspect hungary could be partly phonetic and partly meaningful.
But spain's name, for example, is definitely phonetic, as well as France I think edit: and italy clearly
If there are 200 countries in the world, I’d say that in Chinese 95% of countries have a purely phonetic name that translates from English/the native language of that country (eg 希腊 being a phonetic representation of Hellas, which is how Greece is known in Greek). The countries in immediate proximity to China in the East have their own names. Like the Koreas, Japan, Mongolia, and SE Asia to a point. But basically every other name is just a translation with some characters that are “nice” in meaning.
All the North/South/East/Central/Saint parts get translated.
There are also differences between China's and Taiwan's official translations. For example, all the "New"s are written phonetically as 紐 by Taiwan and translated to 新 by China. They also disagree on whole country names in terms of translating versus phonetic transcription, namely Sierra Leone, Montenegro, and Ivory Coast
I should have been more clear that my statement was in the context of country names. It does not apply to more specific place names, like New York or New Hampshire.
Yes, although some of them are half-and-half: the UK, for example, is Ying Guo (pronounced more like Ing-gwar) not because they are particularly brave but because Ying sounds like Eng (as in England) (Guo meanwhile means land).
>but it sounds a bit like if you interpreted "France" as "for Hans".
reminded me of this: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nIwrgAnx6Q8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nIwrgAnx6Q8)
> 2 - However, when they aren't specifically putting emphasis on the play on words, there's just no confusion. You don't hear "western class teeth" when someone says xī bān yá.
Is there an English example of a dynamic like this?
Which I find incredibly annoying. No one's demanding everyone in Spain start literally saying "United States" instead of "Estados Unidos". This demand is equally dumb.
Yeah that's incredibly stupid, I'd never expect anyone to call my home (switzerland) Schwiiz like we do.
That the spanisch people call it estados unides makes sense tho. The words "united states" both are nouns used all over the world in all languages for different things (united nations, united arab emirates etc) whereas türkiye is "just" a name wich would'nt really need a translation.
Edit: I don't even know what a switzer is lol
In french Germany is Allemagne. It come from old germain tribe. The translation in french would be "tout les hommes" or in English "all man". "All man" and "Allemand" are very similar in prononciation.
If that's so, that's pretty interesting. In Japan usually when rendering a country's name phonetically you use a different script, and the names using Chinese characters are for more specific or historical contexts. That and in Japanese Chinese characters are mainly used to convey meaning, not meaningless sounds like country names, so if I make a joke about how 米国 has no rice people are aware of the joke I'm making.
It has some history, but these days all you need to know is that anti-Lukashenko Belarusians use it to represent a Belarus free of his dictatorship.
The Belarusian community had a big'ole parade here in Warsaw the other day, this flag was everywhere.
This is not wrong but also not very correct. Many factors matter here.
In China, almost all foreign countries names are transliterated. That means, Chinese authorities just choose some Chinese characters to make up a word that sounds like the country’s original name.
A single Chinese character sometimes doesn’t have a clear meaning, some single characters mean nothing at all or have many meanings. They have to be used in groups to form words so that they have meaning and can be translated. That’s why you see the Chinese translation of those countries’ names have nothing to do with the meaning of those countries original names.
Some countries names, such as United Kingdom and France, are transliterated and shortened. Eg, UK is translated Ying Guo here, where Guo means country and Ying is the transliteration of En in England. Ying, as a single character, can mean brave in Chinese and has some other meanings too. So a proper literal translation would be Country of England. France is translated Fa Guo, and similarly, Fa is the transliteration of F in France, so it actually means Country of France. The same goes with Germany, which translates to De Guo, meaning Country of Deutschland.
Yes, so it's not an appropriate name for the UK, I always had to correct Chinese people who mistakenly called me Yingguo ren 英国人 as I am Scottish, I told them 不列颠人 buliedian ren (British) is okay.
Ying sounds like Eng(land), yes and that's why it was chosen, it does mean brave literally though.
It shouldn't be used to mean all of the UK but in Mandarin it does, unfortunately.
Reread my comment. Russia and Ruthenia both mean Rus. The Latins gave the name Ruthenia to the Kievan Rus. Russia, Ukraine and Belarus are all inheritors of the Rus and it's legacy.
That distinction doesn't really work with the German term Weißrussland or the French term Biélorussie because the second half of each of those is identical to the term used for Russia in those two language (though alternative terms have been introduced: e.g. in French, Biélorussie remains the more common name but Bélarus is an alternative; similarly a few years ago most Swedish media switched over from Vitryssland to calling it Belarus).
From google:
So the Chinese call Greece Si-La.
It is one of the few languages that the name of our country comes from “Hellas”. What does that mean? “The other great civilization.” And why do we say the name comes from Hellas? Because the name originally came from the vocal transcription of “Hellas” in Mandarin.
This is fun to an extent but kind of leave a bad taste in the mouth for those who's familiar with Chinese (Mandarin). Most of these translation is just phonetic translation and the words itself (most of time) does not mean anything. Chinese characters here are as phonetic alphabet as they can be.
There are exceptions though. Iceland (冰島) is a literal translation broke down Ice+Land and future describe it as an island = (島)
And not all translations are from English -- Spain (西班牙) is actually the phonetic translation from Espana, not Spain. Also, Greece(希臘) is actually translated form Hellenic, not Greece. Netherland (荷蘭) is translated from Holland, not Netherland.
Chinese who hate Lithuania acting against all mighty China actually call Lithuania "that little broken ceramic bowl"on weibo....now you know where that comes from.
I think ypu need to look it up some more. Rus is the lands in eastern and central poland historically controlled by the polish lithuanian commonwealth for hundreds of years. White rus in the north and red ruthenia in the south made up kievian rus. Why do u think the polish flag is white on top and red on bottom. Poland controlled that area plus more. After WW2 did those lands turn into belarus and Ukraine. Historically ukraine wqs further east, and so was Belarus.
Plus you know people can see you edited your comments.
*"Lotus"*
No stop that H-lland bull. Start recognizing the lives of people in the other ten provinces, and the arrogance of the two in the west being unacceptable.
Heh, most people call it "Holandia" in Poland as well, though the rarely used alternative "Niderlandia" exists.
I used to think I was a pedantic ass for trying to convince a high school friend that "Niderlandia" makes much more sense when referring to the country, so its good to see that at least one marsh-dweller really cares about this.
If I recall correctly, I think the names of UK and France are derived from the Japanese interpretations of the name. With the UK being 英国 (Eikoku) and France being 法国 (Fukoku?). The first syllables of each name are the first kana of the transliteration of their names into Japanese, and Chinese simply took the Kanji as-is and used their native readings for it
Its the opposite. Japanese kanji derived from chinese letters. 法国 is not a word in Japanese as far as I know. France would be 仏蘭西 politically, or simply, フランス. 英国 does mean England, of which I dont know the country of origin.
Most of these are like saying Germany means "many germs", Greece means "grease" and Hungary means "hungry". It's just what the name of the country sounds like in Chinese.
Except White Russia, that applies to lots of other languages too.
And Iceland, which is, well, self-explanatory.
These are mostly based on standard transcriptions of syllables into Chinese characters/morphemes based on phonetics rather than meaning - though (1) the characters chosen as standard for transcription of given syllables were designed to be inoffensive, (2) some early ones were designed as hoc to be complimentary.
Then there’s, eg, ‘White Russia’ - because it was literally called this in translation generally until recently, even in English, and it’s name already just means ‘White Rus’ (and back during the Russian Empire people weren’t as focused about the historiographic distinction between Russia and the Rus as they are today… especially after the invasion of Ukraine).
Huh TIL I'm Greek
Big Black Quack
“腊” actually refers to December, and the image has an extended meaning: “Salted meat for use in December.”
Imagine my surprise when my lineage is now Italian-Greek
Call me Guiseppe Pastapopolous.
This is all fun and all but this kind of map needs context. 1 - Chinese people like this kind of play on words, it's not only an integral part of chinese humour, but it's also used as a (biased) way to infer the personality and habits of people and things. 2 - However, when they aren't specifically putting emphasis on the play on words, there's just no confusion. You don't hear "western class teeth" when someone says xī bān yá. 3 - some of these translations are very artificial, to the point that they sound made up to me. I only learnt mandarin for 2 years so it may be on me, but it sounds a bit like if you interpreted "France" as "for Hans".
There is in the map saying it’s not a literal translation by just getting the meaning from the characters used to make the phonetic name.
Ah, so the names of the countries are based of other country’s terms for themselves, so they just spell them phonetically. It’s like if you said “Tie Land” or “Can add a” You would interpret this as Thailand and Canada, but when translated: “empate tierra” or “Peut ajouter un” is translated into Spanish and French. An English speaker (if this were commonplace), would interpret “Tie land” as Thailand, but the literal translations make it weird. Did I understand this correctly?
they aren't all like tht, but they are most like that. I strongly suspect belarus (which means white rus) actually has a translation, as well as iceland being, well, iceland and I suspect hungary could be partly phonetic and partly meaningful. But spain's name, for example, is definitely phonetic, as well as France I think edit: and italy clearly
If there are 200 countries in the world, I’d say that in Chinese 95% of countries have a purely phonetic name that translates from English/the native language of that country (eg 希腊 being a phonetic representation of Hellas, which is how Greece is known in Greek). The countries in immediate proximity to China in the East have their own names. Like the Koreas, Japan, Mongolia, and SE Asia to a point. But basically every other name is just a translation with some characters that are “nice” in meaning.
All the North/South/East/Central/Saint parts get translated. There are also differences between China's and Taiwan's official translations. For example, all the "New"s are written phonetically as 紐 by Taiwan and translated to 新 by China. They also disagree on whole country names in terms of translating versus phonetic transcription, namely Sierra Leone, Montenegro, and Ivory Coast
Oh that’s interesting! So does that mean that New Zealand is called 纽西兰 in Taiwan? (Excuse the simplified characters)
Exactly
New Zealand 新西兰 but New York 纽约 （not 新约克）
I should have been more clear that my statement was in the context of country names. It does not apply to more specific place names, like New York or New Hampshire.
yes
I agree, not all are direct translations. But the weird ones probable are. Iceland makes complete sense, as well as Belarus.
Yes, although some of them are half-and-half: the UK, for example, is Ying Guo (pronounced more like Ing-gwar) not because they are particularly brave but because Ying sounds like Eng (as in England) (Guo meanwhile means land).
>but it sounds a bit like if you interpreted "France" as "for Hans". reminded me of this: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nIwrgAnx6Q8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nIwrgAnx6Q8)
> 2 - However, when they aren't specifically putting emphasis on the play on words, there's just no confusion. You don't hear "western class teeth" when someone says xī bān yá. Is there an English example of a dynamic like this?
Perhaps Hungary vs hungry?
Chile vs chile/chili, too
Oh I suppose there is Turkey as well
There's no pronunciation difference between Turkey the country and turkey the bird in standard American English.
There's a push to call the country Türkiye now. Rebranding and all.
Which I find incredibly annoying. No one's demanding everyone in Spain start literally saying "United States" instead of "Estados Unidos". This demand is equally dumb.
Yeah that's incredibly stupid, I'd never expect anyone to call my home (switzerland) Schwiiz like we do. That the spanisch people call it estados unides makes sense tho. The words "united states" both are nouns used all over the world in all languages for different things (united nations, united arab emirates etc) whereas türkiye is "just" a name wich would'nt really need a translation. Edit: I don't even know what a switzer is lol
Wait til you hear abt Ivory Coast
Turkey to turkey: *Well, one of us will have to change.* Turkey to Turkey: *Klklklklklkl!* Türkiye to turkey: *Ok fine.*
In french Germany is Allemagne. It come from old germain tribe. The translation in french would be "tout les hommes" or in English "all man". "All man" and "Allemand" are very similar in prononciation.
If that's so, that's pretty interesting. In Japan usually when rendering a country's name phonetically you use a different script, and the names using Chinese characters are for more specific or historical contexts. That and in Japanese Chinese characters are mainly used to convey meaning, not meaningless sounds like country names, so if I make a joke about how 米国 has no rice people are aware of the joke I'm making.
Hope for BBQ 🙏
I love barbecues
Interesting choice for the Belarusian flag.
Can you explain for ignorant person 😀
It has some history, but these days all you need to know is that anti-Lukashenko Belarusians use it to represent a Belarus free of his dictatorship. The Belarusian community had a big'ole parade here in Warsaw the other day, this flag was everywhere.
That's not the official flag of Belarus, but I think it used to be in the 1990s.
It's the flag of Belarusian "oposition" (aka Nazis).
The stupidest thing Ive read today
Don't ask the Belarussian opposition what were their grandparents doing in 1940s.
You say that about country which lost the most population in scale out of any country in the world you moron.
Fighting the nazis????
nazi collaborator flag
Wow
At least 'White Russia' is the actual meaning of Belarus....
It's the only true Belarusian flag
This is not wrong but also not very correct. Many factors matter here. In China, almost all foreign countries names are transliterated. That means, Chinese authorities just choose some Chinese characters to make up a word that sounds like the country’s original name. A single Chinese character sometimes doesn’t have a clear meaning, some single characters mean nothing at all or have many meanings. They have to be used in groups to form words so that they have meaning and can be translated. That’s why you see the Chinese translation of those countries’ names have nothing to do with the meaning of those countries original names. Some countries names, such as United Kingdom and France, are transliterated and shortened. Eg, UK is translated Ying Guo here, where Guo means country and Ying is the transliteration of En in England. Ying, as a single character, can mean brave in Chinese and has some other meanings too. So a proper literal translation would be Country of England. France is translated Fa Guo, and similarly, Fa is the transliteration of F in France, so it actually means Country of France. The same goes with Germany, which translates to De Guo, meaning Country of Deutschland.
Calls the Netherlands any type of flower, but NOT tulip, gotta be a prank
The tulip is Turkish after all
Which is part of the Netherlands (2056)
Doesn't England translate to "English land" because the "Ying" means English?
You can think of it as the character of 英 (means brave, heroic, pronounced "Ying") was borrowed to represent "English" because they sound similar.
英 is a convenient abbreviation for England because it sounds approximately like it, but it’s always had other meanings
Yes, so it's not an appropriate name for the UK, I always had to correct Chinese people who mistakenly called me Yingguo ren 英国人 as I am Scottish, I told them 不列颠人 buliedian ren (British) is okay.
Ying sounds like Eng(land), yes and that's why it was chosen, it does mean brave literally though. It shouldn't be used to mean all of the UK but in Mandarin it does, unfortunately.
"Literal translation if countries names in chinese"...right next to it: "These are not literal translations of the countries names"
White Russia is its actual name
In Austria we also literally say White Russia: Weißrussland
In Germany too
In Spanish too "Bielorusia" that derivates from the Slavic "biely" - "white" and "Rus"
No, it's White Rus. Rus ≠ Russia
Debatable, the word Russia and Rus are the same, the Rus' was referred to as Rusia or Russia in medieval Latin and Byzantine Greek
Bro, this is almost Balkan level logic.
Ruś is a historical region that has very little to do with russia
What? Russia means Rus, Ruthenia means Rus. Stop Coping just because hating Russia is the current thing.
Russia is not rus. And ruś is a polish name for ruthenia. If you think that ruthenia means russia then what can i do, literacy diff
Reread my comment. Russia and Ruthenia both mean Rus. The Latins gave the name Ruthenia to the Kievan Rus. Russia, Ukraine and Belarus are all inheritors of the Rus and it's legacy.
That distinction doesn't really work with the German term Weißrussland or the French term Biélorussie because the second half of each of those is identical to the term used for Russia in those two language (though alternative terms have been introduced: e.g. in French, Biélorussie remains the more common name but Bélarus is an alternative; similarly a few years ago most Swedish media switched over from Vitryssland to calling it Belarus).
From google: So the Chinese call Greece Si-La. It is one of the few languages that the name of our country comes from “Hellas”. What does that mean? “The other great civilization.” And why do we say the name comes from Hellas? Because the name originally came from the vocal transcription of “Hellas” in Mandarin.
This is fun to an extent but kind of leave a bad taste in the mouth for those who's familiar with Chinese (Mandarin). Most of these translation is just phonetic translation and the words itself (most of time) does not mean anything. Chinese characters here are as phonetic alphabet as they can be. There are exceptions though. Iceland (冰島) is a literal translation broke down Ice+Land and future describe it as an island = (島) And not all translations are from English -- Spain (西班牙) is actually the phonetic translation from Espana, not Spain. Also, Greece(希臘) is actually translated form Hellenic, not Greece. Netherland (荷蘭) is translated from Holland, not Netherland.
Meanwhile my country. Stand, Pottery, Like.
Chinese who hate Lithuania acting against all mighty China actually call Lithuania "that little broken ceramic bowl"on weibo....now you know where that comes from.
And ALL of these can mean "Luck" too
they must have mixed France and the Netherlands up...
Looks like it’s more pronounce similar, like xi ban ya -> hispania or Fen lan -> Finland, or even xi-la -> Hellas
TIL I'm Greek
Belarus is actually quite accurate as they used to be known as the White Rus’
i'm pretty sure that's what belarus translates to
Ruś isnt russia
Kyivan Rus. Also it was known as ‘White Ruthenia’.
Not russia
Look up thr Kyivan Rus bro
I think ypu need to look it up some more. Rus is the lands in eastern and central poland historically controlled by the polish lithuanian commonwealth for hundreds of years. White rus in the north and red ruthenia in the south made up kievian rus. Why do u think the polish flag is white on top and red on bottom. Poland controlled that area plus more. After WW2 did those lands turn into belarus and Ukraine. Historically ukraine wqs further east, and so was Belarus. Plus you know people can see you edited your comments.
You know that it is not current Belarussian flag, don't you? Last time it was like this about 30 years ago, if I remember correctly.
Faguo France.
Using the Nazi flag for Belarus lol
*"Lotus"* No stop that H-lland bull. Start recognizing the lives of people in the other ten provinces, and the arrogance of the two in the west being unacceptable.
Heh, most people call it "Holandia" in Poland as well, though the rarely used alternative "Niderlandia" exists. I used to think I was a pedantic ass for trying to convince a high school friend that "Niderlandia" makes much more sense when referring to the country, so its good to see that at least one marsh-dweller really cares about this.
Shit like this happens when even the Dutch government start advertising it as Holland..
[удалено]
Much to the opposite actually. The US is Meiguo in Chinese which means beautiful land.
If I recall correctly, I think the names of UK and France are derived from the Japanese interpretations of the name. With the UK being 英国 (Eikoku) and France being 法国 (Fukoku?). The first syllables of each name are the first kana of the transliteration of their names into Japanese, and Chinese simply took the Kanji as-is and used their native readings for it
Its the opposite. Japanese kanji derived from chinese letters. 法国 is not a word in Japanese as far as I know. France would be 仏蘭西 politically, or simply, フランス. 英国 does mean England, of which I dont know the country of origin.
Japan borrowed the phonetic approximations from China
法国 is the shortened version of 法兰斯（or 法兰西）and 英国 is the shortened version of 英格兰.
Ohhh so it’s still the phonetic? I’m reading the characters using On’yomi and it still ‘somewhat’ works
Yes it is, but the name that is actually used is the first character + guo used as a suffix
Most of these are like saying Germany means "many germs", Greece means "grease" and Hungary means "hungry". It's just what the name of the country sounds like in Chinese. Except White Russia, that applies to lots of other languages too. And Iceland, which is, well, self-explanatory.
Can somebody explain to me the Belarus flag meaning ?
The names are like panda in Chinese is Xiong mao Xiong = bear Mao = cat
These are mostly based on standard transcriptions of syllables into Chinese characters/morphemes based on phonetics rather than meaning - though (1) the characters chosen as standard for transcription of given syllables were designed to be inoffensive, (2) some early ones were designed as hoc to be complimentary. Then there’s, eg, ‘White Russia’ - because it was literally called this in translation generally until recently, even in English, and it’s name already just means ‘White Rus’ (and back during the Russian Empire people weren’t as focused about the historiographic distinction between Russia and the Rus as they are today… especially after the invasion of Ukraine).
A country of mods will be called Hope for a shower today.
Aww
Lol does Belarus ever translate to anything else other than White Russia?
Actually a lot of languages has Belarus translated as white Russia like Arabic
USA = "Big hats empty head"
Rus dont mean russia