Country name translations

[marooder86]

Quite interesting map. Seems like Canada is the bigest village in the world. Also The Land of the People of Open Fields I'd hardly call a translation of the word Poland or Polska. This phrase rather points the origins of the name, which itself is nothing more then bunch of letters.

 

[SiberianTiger]

The glory/slave connection strikes me as remote at best. The origin of the root slav- comes from the proto-slavic verb for "to speak", so "speakers" would be more fitting. The glory-slava connection is an invention of 19th century pan-slavism, and slave only sounds like slav in western European languages.

Actually, the word slave, adopted in many Western European languages, roots in Greek σκλάβος, which was invented in Eastern Roman Empire circa 560 A.D. as a common word for slaves with Slavic origins (who were a very popular "live stock" at the time), which then became a common word for every slave. This word is different from either ancient Greek δόελος, or from Latin servus, or from how slaves are called in Slavic languages themselves.

This not very cheerful fact was considerably played up by Nazi propaganda, and therefore, mentioning of it in today's context is not very welcome.

 

[Urwumpe]

Yeah, and the self-description of the Slavic people is actually "Sloveni".

 

[rseferino]

My country, Venezuela is "Little Venice" for:

 

[bande]

wow, I didn't knew I was born in "the land of bulls"!
I made some research about the origins of the name "Italia", and I found out it marked the extreme southern regions of Italy (once colonized by the Greeks), while the Celts lived in the north, which was called "Gallia Cisalpina" by the Romans :thumbup:

 

[Sar]

Finland is marked as just land Even though the word fin should ring a bell to anyone.

Apparently the word suomi comes from estonia where suomi means fin (as far as I know) but in finnish the first part "Suo" means swamp, "mi" doesn't mean anything, but if it was "Suoni" It'd either mean "My swamp" of "vein"

 

[bande]

Finland is marked as just land Even though the word fin should ring a bell to anyone.

Apparently the word suomi comes from estonia where suomi means fin (as far as I know) but in finnish the first part "Suo" means swamp, "mi" doesn't mean anything, but if it was "Suoni" It'd either mean "My swamp" of "vein"

OT: a family friend is Turkish and he has lived in Germany for a long time, so that he can speak well both Turkish and German... he told that Finnish and Turkish are much similar, while other scandinavian language are very close to German! do you agree?
anyway, I love scandinavian countries... one year ago I spent some day in Copenhagen and I really loved that northern-european atmosphere :thumbup:

 

[Linguofreak]

"The United States of Amerigo" isn't very accurate, better would be "... of Amerigoland", as the name had been derived by Latinizing Vespucci's name, and then using the common process of replacing the -us ending with -a to make a place name. Even better would be "... of Henry's Land" as "Henry" and "Amerigo" trace back to the same root, "Haimirich".

---------- Post added at 14:07 ---------- Previous post was at 13:16 ----------

And Germany is not "Land of the people" (though it sounds nicer), but actually "Land of the tribe" or more accurate "Land of the people who speak the language of the tribe".

Yes and no. By the time "Deutschland" was used as the name for Germany, "Deutsch" had come to mean "German". But the original meaning of the Proto-Germanic root *þeudō was indeed "people" or "nation".

(Incidentally, in keeping with the Tolkienian themes that have popped up in this thread, Tolkien used Old English to represent the language of the Rohirrim. So names that appear in LotR like "Theoden" and "Theodred" actually stem from the same root as "Deutsch". Also, the founder of Rohan "Eorl" has a name that literally means "Earl".)

 

[RisingFury]

Slovenia = Slave or Glory?! How the HELL did they get that?

"Slava" means glory, being the closest to what I can come up with, it's still a long way off from "Slovenija".

And can't believe they put Slovenija = Slovakia = Slave or Glory. Running out of ideas, are we?

 

[DanM]

If I had a country it would be hard to put on there, because it would be called "The People's Most Glorious Imperial Federal Democratic Republic of Chunga". It's kinda a long story, a very long story.

 

[SiberianTiger]

OT: a family friend is Turkish and he has lived in Germany for a long time, so that he can speak well both Turkish and German... he told that Finnish and Turkish are much similar, while other scandinavian language are very close to German! do you agree?
anyway, I love scandinavian countries... one year ago I spent some day in Copenhagen and I really loved that northern-european atmosphere :thumbup:

Your friend is seeing diversity between Finnish and the rest of Scandinavian languages right, but he is wrong telling that Turkish is similar to Finnish. At least, science doesn't support him.

While most of the languages spoken in Europe are descendants of Indo-European family, and were brought into scene by the common ancestors of most of us who were nomads from Southern steppes:

Finnish, on the other hand, is one of the most flourishing [ame="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uralic_languages"]Uralic languages[/ame], spoken by aboriginals of the Northern Europe and Northwestern Asia:

At the same time, Turkish is from entirely different family, of [ame="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altaic_languages"]Altaic languages[/ame], and is in more close relation to Japanese than it is to any European language:

 

[Wally]

Romania - Those who maintain the forts?!
Moldova - Mud?!

From where did the author got this so-called translations?

As far as I know, Romania's name came from a desire to remind everyone that once there were Romans, from The Roman Empire, that lived here (a very bad decision for a name, if you ask me). Moldova's name came after a river, which was named after a mythological dog.