Rice Country

[Areckx]

I always thought it was funny that Japanese and Chinese call us rice-country.

Hang in there! A stubborn heart will push you into fluency!

[Kobo-Daishi]

Areckx wrote:

I always thought it was funny that Japanese and Chinese call us rice-country.

The Chinese don't call America "rice-country". Only the Japanese.

The Chinese call American "beautiful-country".

Kobo.

[Kobo-Daishi]

Patrick_ChineseForum wrote:

Maybe the Chinese do invent words for everything. For example, in Thai language (my first language) we call "America" a-me-li-ca (Thai has no R sound). In Japanese, they call it a-me-ri-ka (I used to study Japanese). The Chinese call it Mei Guo. They basically invent a new word for America. It almost seems like they purposely make their language complicate... weird (sorry for venting)

Renzhe wrote:

Mei is from a-ME-rica, Guo means country.

Fa Guo = FRA-nce + Guo

De Guo = DE-utschland + Guo

Ying Guo = ENG-land + Guo

Jbradfor wrote:

There are a handful of countries, however, that Chinese does not do this, and instead picks one character that sounds close to the name, plus 国. In addition to the ones renzhe mention, Korea and Thailand come to mind. Japan is a bit of an exception as well.

亞美利加 (ya mei li jia) - America

亚美利加

德意志 (de yi zhi) - Germany

法蘭西 (fa lian xi) - France

法兰西

英格蘭 (ying ge lan) - England

英格兰

澳大利亞 (ao da li ya) - Australia

澳大利亚

I think there was another way of transliterating America but I may be mistaken.

As for Japan and Korea, China has had longer interaction with them.

And besides Japan and Korea both at one time used Chinese characters for writing so already had theirs picked out.

Thailand used to be called Siam so there are Chinese characters for Siam but off hand I don't remember them.

I think Thailand is a rather recent name.

Kobo.

[skylee]

Consider 美利堅 for America. Siam is 暹羅.

http://www.judicial.gov.tw/db/db04/db04-03.asp

[yialanliu]

The US is a huge exporter of rice to Japan. Used to be the largest exporter of rice from the 1960s to 1980s. So for a country that depends on a staple and gets a good portion of it from the US, it wouldn't be that weird to call it that.

While it probably isn't the major reason, it makes the name quite normal especially since phonetically, it's right.