To detract from the confusion the European Union is Union Européenne (UE) in French.
I thought it would be so funny if any of the EU employees would go to a bar in Brussels (majority French-speaking) and have an aneurysm explaining what they do to a local in broken French. Not that it would ever happen… but it would be funny
ITT: Americans struggling to comprehend languages other than their own
That’s why they use EUA (États-Unis d’Amérique) for the abbreviation.
But we tend to forget de A so just ÉU
In Spanish you can see EEUU for «Estados Unidos». The letters are doubled because they’re plural.
I still pronounce it as Eeeh Eeeh Uu Uu. Its just fun to say.
I’ve always wondered why spanish speakers online use EEUU for the US. I once asked a friend of mine and he said “that’s just the way it is”; this is a much better explanation lol
A bit like how we used to call the CCCP the USSR?
The official name for the country was “Unión de Repúblicas Socialistas Soviéticas”, hence URSS
You sure the official name wasn’t spelled in Cyrillic instead of Latin With Dumb Shit Over It?
In Polish, “United States” is Stany Zjednoczone, but the acronym is USA, even though that doesn’t match up at all
But Unia Europejska is UE
Union Européenne as well, and French is one of the languages they actually care about
I am forever annoyed that every language has the audacity to rename other countries to something that is not their name.
Germany? It’s called Deutschland
Spain? España.
Russia? Rossiya.
It’s everywhere and it’s weird.
Because no one can say Magyarország, and it’s easier to make fun of being Hungary for Turkey.
Oman, Iran, with Chad, to Chile bc I was Hungary for Turkey 😋
The Netherlands, but in English the language is called Dutch.
But I prefer when it happens to cities. Aix-la-Chapelle or Aachen. Liège or Luik or Lüttich. Ghent or Gand or Gent.
Japan? AnimeLand
I learned not that long ago the Japanese refer to Japan as Nippon, and that stuck with me
They usually say Nihon instead of Nippon.
Some English used to use words derived from nippon as well but they mostly dropped out of the language not too long after WWII, prob bc nip is an old slur for Japanese people. There’s an ee cummings poem that refers to a piece of “nipponized steel”.
https://allpoetry.com/poem/13587560-plato-told-by-e.e.-cummings
Son of a gun, cool! Do you happen to know if it was a transliterative swap (I’m not sure if that’s what it could be called), where Nippon and Nihon actually sound similar enough if your native language is Japanese?
I’m not entirely sure about how the pronunciations developed. I know that in modern Japanese there are only certain ways syllables can change their sound. Japan uses a syllabary rather than an alphabet, so for example they can only say the sounds bu and ra, but never “bra” because they don’t have a standalone “b”. Their syllables get modified in predictable ways, like ka can change to ga, going from a voiceless to voiced velar stop. In much the same way, the ho syllable can become po.
I don’t know much about the history of when nippon became nihon, but the article you linked has a short section on it
Japanese 日 and 本 were historically pronounced niti and pon, respectively. In compounds, however, final voiceless stops (i.e. p, t, k) of the first word were unreleased in Middle Chinese, and the pronunciation of 日本 was thus Nippon or Jippon (with the adjacent consonants assimilating).
Historical sound change in Japanese has led to the modern pronunciations of the individual characters as nichi and hon. The pronunciation Nihon originated, possibly in the Kantō region, as a reintroduction of this independent pronunciation of 本 into the compound. This must have taken place during the Edo period, after another sound change occurred which would have resulted in this form becoming Niwon and later Nion.
Dunno, as a German, I’d find it ahistorical if everybody was using “Deutschland” … the nation-state as an idea, and a unified nation state, are relatively young. Before that, what we call Deutschland today was a mess. It’s no surprise that romance languages use some or another variation of “Allemagne” … the german dialect spoken around the southwestern border is still called “Allemannisch” even in Germany, same with “Saxon” and the variations “Saksa” to the east …
I kinda prefer it the way it is in this case, honestly …
Russia == Rossiya doesn’t belong in that list.
Spain and españa are also just cognates
I’m annoyed by the inverse. I speak English, why shouldn’t I use English words? I use English words for everything else in life. Does every other country say “United States of America”?
“Because that’s what I call it and so should every other language!”
See how that sounds?
And honestly, some of them do just translate (more or less). Like España vs Spain, pretty much any Spanish word that starts with es(consonant) drops the leading e when translated to English (estado, estudiante, and escuela for state, student, and school). We also don’t have the same o/a suffices. So that leaves spañ, except I don’t think any Spanish word ends with ñ (it makes a “ny” sound to bridge with the next letter, for those who don’t know) and Spain comes pretty darn close.
Not too mention that pronunciations and even alphabets are bound to change. Just how much do you want to stay authentic? Because if I start talking about عُمان (Google says that means Oman in Arabic, and looks about right from what I remember seeing on license plates there) I’m going to lose a lot of people.
Asked my half-Japanese wife how to say “Japan” in Japanese. First she said “Japan”, then “Nippon” pronounced “Nihon” (silent P), then “Nippongo” (silent P), or something I can’t type exactly. She also wrote down “Wakarami” with a note “I don’t know”. She was born and bred in the Philippines, so there’s that twist.
Now I’m totally confused, fuck it, Japan it is.
So yeah, how authentic do you want to be?! Bitching about such things is a sign I can’t take one seriously.
I’m not insensitive. Lady at Lowe’s saw my Ukraine patch and said, “Slava Ukraini!” I said it back, but came on here to ask for proper pronunciation.
And Turkey is fucking Turkey. Fuck the haters.
Im happy with it. Better than 中国 or .مصر No idea how to read nor how to speak it out.
A transliteration would be fine, eg Nihon, Zhongguo
Is that what my wife was trying to say?
https://old.lemmy.world/comment/20033856
Fuck it. Japan it is.
And while we’re at it, why do languages have the audacity to use ANY words different from other languages!
See how this sounds?
So “Etats” is “State”… just written backwards?
🤯
If you want to be serious, the word state and état are both coming from an older version of French when it was written estat. French replaced ES with É because it wasn’t pronouncing the S, while English dropped the E and kept pronouncing the S. It happened to multiple words, although some also come from Latin.
Étrange - Strange. Époux - Spouse. École - School. Épice - Spice. Éponge - Sponge.
It also happened with circumflex.
Hôpital - Hospital. Forêt - Forest. Pâte - Paste.
Here’s a whole video about exactly this.
Ah alors tu as découvert comment est-ce que le français fonctionne. Désolé pas désolé
ah so you have discovered in your comment how french functions.
what’s Desole?
It’s when you remove the bottom of a shoe.
Sorry… it says sorry not sorry 😅😅
is the rest of my translation correct?
Not too bad overall if you don’t know any French though!
no i learnt french in freshman year college… 15 years ago
It quickly gets dissolved into the abyss of the mind, I get that! I lived in Japan for 4 years and can only remember a few useless bits.
No, but close. Comment means how.
So you have discovered how french functions.
comment means how
damn should have guessed
What a supercalifragilisticexpialidocious statement!
In Serbo-Croatian, the acronym is САД. It transliterates to SAD.
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The French and acronyms. You got NATO, but the French translate it so they call it OTAN. Directly translated, they also just say the ‘States United’.
Anyone’s guess who did word order first to find out why French is a silly language.
French predates English.
Also, bold calling a language silly in english
I decided to look into this because I was curious.
The unification and regulation of the French language came about in 1653 with the founding of the Académie Française and it actually took a while for the revolutionaries to pivot from “liberty of language” to “the only language in France should be French” English was already established by this time and the vowel shift was basically complete.
According to Wikipedia, Middle French died out in the 17th century while Middle English died out in the 15th. Ergo: Modern English predates Modern French
If we check back farther it seems the two languages developed similarly though the arbitrary divides for each age of language (old, middle, modern) seem to show with English being first by roughly a century.
Of course this is all arbitrary since language doesn’t evolve discretely. However the Wikipedia entries for the oldest Gallo-Romance (precursor to French) is from 842CE, whereas old English poetry dates as early as 650-700CE. Once again suggesting English predates French.
Now there is a difficulty here with French because it originates from Vulgar Latin which could be considered older than English, but I’m not sure many would call it French since lots of European languages branched from Vulgar Latin
As for silliness… yeah no arguments there lol
Neat, I stand corrected.
I doubt the french history teacher I had who taught me that is still alive though.
To be fair the same happens in Spanish with most acronyms
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