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From: dave@utcsrgv.UUCP
Newsgroups: net.misc
Subject: Re: Translated Country Names
Message-ID: <1960@utcsrgv.UUCP>
Date: Mon, 15-Aug-83 13:29:00 EDT
Article-I.D.: utcsrgv.1960
Posted: Mon Aug 15 13:29:00 1983
Date-Received: Mon, 15-Aug-83 15:12:44 EDT
References: <1068@eagle.UUCP>
Organization: CSRG, University of Toronto
Lines: 25

A cognate of the name "Germany" is also used in other foreign languages
(e.g., French: Allemagne; Portuguese: Alemanha; Hebrew: Germanyah [hard 'G']).
I suspect it's the "Deutschland" which is an unusual derivation. It's
not surprising considering that for many years Germany was a mixture
of different mini-states rather than one cohesive country. Also, it is
a country name which would have entered any language's common parlance
relatively early and thus become more established in the language.
Fiji, for example, is probably called Fiji in any language.

	One common reason for differences in country names, as pointed
out, is translation, or partial translation, of the name. For example,
"England" is "Inglaterra" in Portuguese, where or course "terra" means
land; on the other hand, Finland is "Finlandia". Again, this can likely
be ascribed to the fact that England was a commonly-used word in
Portuguese long before Finland. Many countries such as Hungary (Magyar),
Finland (Suomi), Albania (Shqiperia), Japan (Nippon) were given names
by foreigners somewhere along the line which became more-or-less world
standards. When you think about it, it's not unusual that a people should
think of itself diferrently than does the rest of the world.

This discussion should probably move into net.nlang.

Dave Sherman, Toronto
-- 
 {linus,cornell,watmath,ihnp4,floyd,allegra,utzoo,uw-beaver}!utcsrgv!dave