加拿大 (Canada) etymology

[boctulus]

Hi everyone

 

    Any idea ?

 

 

[OneEye]

It's a loan word. In most dialects of Chinese, 加 is pronounced with a k- or g- instead of a j- (for instance, in Cantonese, 加拿大 is gaa¹ naa⁴ daai⁶).

[boctulus]

Genius! 

 

Thank you very much OneEye 

[Hofmann]

Most country names are transliterations. Sometimes you don't see the whole transliteration, e.g. 美 is short for 亞美利加.

[boctulus]

When I start to try the translation of country names, at first looked possible (make sense to me)

 

法國 France : law-country 

德國 Germany : mind-country 

義大利 Italy : virtuous-large-profit (rich country)

英國 UK : flower-country ? maybe Holland but I don't know UK, so...

香港 Hong Kong : fragrant-port

 

But 加拿大 was impossible to translate 

 

Now, I see.... 義大利 and maybe 德國 are also loan words as almost each one (even 法國) in the list 

[Kamille]

Looking for translations based on the meaning of the characters is no use. As the others said, all these names are loan words (or their short-forms) :

法國 : 法蘭西 (France)

俄國 : 俄羅斯
德國 : 德意志 (Deutsch)

英國 : 英格蘭 (England). Also : 聯合王國 (UK) and 不列顛 (Britain). There's also 蘇格蘭 (Scotland), 威爾斯 (Wales), and 愛爾蘭島 (Ireland). Although in common speech they just call all that 英國, regardless of how angry a Scott would get if he heard it

 

香港 is different, though. It's not a loan word. 香港 is Cantonese, another dialect of Chinese. So it indeed can be translated as "fragrant port". The same is not true for every places' names in China though: for instance 烏魯木齊 is a loan word for Urumqi. It's not Chinese. It's a local dialect, completely unrelated to Chinese. You usually can find these names in remote places, only recently added to China (Qing Empire and such). 

 

In Taiwan there's a bunch of places' names that come from various aboriginal languages. And sometimes they don't even look like. Kaohsiung (高雄) for example is a loan word that underwent a number of transformations in order to look like a real Chinese word but it's not. Its original name was Takao, which means "bamboo forest" in aboriginal (I forgot which tribe but it's likely to be the Siraya or the Makatao). It was only spoken until the Japanese came and heard that word. They wrote it down as 高雄 (pronounced in Japanese as "taka-o"). And then in 1945, when the Chinese came back they saw the characters 高雄 and decided to keep them, without knowing that it was a loan word. That explains why you can sometimes see the characters 打狗 for that city. It never was a place where people would beat dogs : 打狗 is the Taiwanese version of the loan word. It was what the Taiwanese heard when they listened to aborigines saying "takao", even before the Japanese came. So many names and so many stories but the place never was anything else than a bamboo forest. There never were any "tall males" or "beaten dogs" in Kaohsiung (or maybe one or two, but it's unrelated  ). And in truth, no one can tell for sure that the meaning "bamboo forest" didn't itself come from another loan word or even a permutation between two words from the same aboriginal language in the first place. Who knows? 

Same goes for that famous lake 哭泣湖. There's even a legend about lovers crying over someone's death so much that a lake of tears was created and blablabla, but the truth is nothing like that: kuchi is once again a loan word, borrowed from another aboriginal language (I forgot which one and the original meaning though).

[Shelley]

I would not pay much attention to the meanings of your country list and UK  英國   is hero, brave country not flower country but its not important as it doesn't have any purpose except to indicate pronunciation.

 

I am afraid there is no real use in trying to force a meaning on this type of thing unless it is for you to personally remember them, but they have no real basis in use.

[roddy]

“regardless of how angry a Scott would get if he heard it ”

 Scot, one t, you CULTURALLY INSENSITIVE BUFFOON!!!!!!

[Kamille]

Shite you're right! See, I have a Scottish friend whose family name is Scott. So I innocently thought the demonym was spelled the same way. It was all easier when you were called Picts. At least whatever happened, no one would have thought about spelling it Pictt.

[roddy]

Sorry to have Pict a fight. 

[renzhe]

​Indeed. And it used to be pronounced k- in Mandarin too until relatively recently, which survived in the names Nanking and Peking.

​

​Sorry about the quote, this new editor is killing me.

 

 

It's a loan word. In most dialects of Chinese, 加 is pronounced with a k- or g- instead of a j-

​

​

[roddy]

Renzhe, there's no new editor yet. If you're having issues post a help topic and I'll see what I can do. 

[renzhe]

It's over at http://www.chinese-forums.com/index.php?/topic/47707-very-beta-test-run-of-upgraded-forum-software/page-2

 

Started a few days ago.

[imron]

And it used to be pronounced k- in Mandarin too until relatively recently

Did it? I thought that was a vestige of of a different romanisation, which used a k to represent the same sound as the pinyin j.

[Hofmann]

Or rather a non-Mandarin Chinese language was used to transliterate them.

[renzhe]

Did it? I thought that was a vestige of of a different romanisation, which used a k to represent the same sound as the pinyin j.

Now, I am not an expert on this, but I remember reading a very funny quote here on the forum from an 18th century book about some linguist or other decrying the "modern" pronunciation "jing". Alas, I can't find it.

As far as I know, a shift occurred from Middle Chinese from IPA /k/, /kʰ/, /ɡʰ/ to modern Mandarin /tɕ/, /tɕʰ/ before /i/, /y/, or /j/, so original kjaeng (京) eventually turned into jing.

This process was much slower in the Nanjing dialect of Mandarin, which remained the prestige dialect for a long time. The older romanisations such as the original French, the Chinese postal romanisation, and Wade-Giles all follow the Nanjing standard of their time, or at least that was my impression.

Perhaps one of our resident linguists can chip in, here is one of the few useful sources I found: https://www.quora.com/Whats-the-story-with-the-k-j-phonetic-shift-in-Mandarin?share=1

Wiki is also useful: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_Chinese_phonology#Initials

Note, by "recent", I mean 300 years or so. Beijingers have pronounced it "jing" for at least that long. Nanjingers not so much, and that's where the original transcription came from.