The state I am from, Oregon, was named for
More on Yucatan: Now I finished that article. A scholar in 1890 found a bit of evidence that one of the four goofy meanings (“these are our wives’ necklaces”) might not have been so goofy – it may have actually referred to some land, that under control of the powerful native Itzaes family. The full name, Yucalpeten, really meant “the LAND of our wives’ necklaces” (notice the land comprising northern, lowland Guatemala is still the “Peten”), with some metaphorical, poetic evocation. I don’t know…I personally find any of the other three theories equally plausible.
For You…was Oregon named for you?
I remember that joke from the “New York Kids’ Book,” one of my bibles when I was 8 or 9 years old (in the late '70s.)
Serious answer: yes, in general, if the same legend is told about multiple places (which is quite common), it is generally evidence that the story is not true for any of the places. It’s not definitive proof, though. It could be true, or it could be true of one place but the story is borrowed to apply to another.
Generally, a legend scholar will examine the variants of a story over time and place, gathering as much context as possible from history and contemporary oral tradition to make a judgement. The relationship of legends to reality is generally not zero. And, pace Bozuit, in academia legends and myths are two different genres and approched with different theoretical tools.
No, ‘Ni’ is sun, ‘ppon’ is origin. Though that looks weird, and isn’t how the character would be pronounced in isolation like that (which would be ‘hon’)…but the double-p is all part of the second syllable, in any case.
yaht is Cantonese for day or sun, bun is a word that is used to enumerate books, but its graphic origin is a tree, so “yaht bun” together kind of looks like the sun rising behind a tree – this also resembles the construction of the Chinese character for “east”, so one could see how the construction may have developed. Modern Cantonese is believed to sound very much like to the common Chinese language of centuries past, so it is quite possible that “Japan” is of Chinese origin. My guess would be that “Nippon” is much more recent, probably not of Chinese origin, inasmuch as it has not really been a unified nation for even as long as the USA.
Not “badly”, but into a different set of phonetic representation and with a different transliteration system than you’re used to.
Marco Polo called Japan Zipango. I always assumed he got this from the Chinese version of the name, and it looks as if Zr Ben could easily lead to Zipango.
I could then easily see Zipango morphing through European languages to Japan.
This doesn’t depend upon the historical accident of one trader just happening to bring back a name – even polo admits that he and his family were by no means the only European traders in China. I don’t know if it’s correct or not, either, but years ago I was struck by the similarities, and it seemed to at least provisionally be a plausible etymology for the name “Japan”.
The second character (本) in the Japanese word for Japan (日本 - Nippon or Nihon) by itself usually means “book” – the “hon” reading presumably is cognate with the Cantonese “bun” for the same character.
And as everyone knows, “Iceland” was named to discourage furriners from moving there. They all went to Greenland instead.
And I head that it was the Shanghai-ese call it “Japan” .
The same story is told about the founding of Carthage by Dido:
The name which is read nowadays as Nihon or Nippon – 日本 – is first attested in 8th century CE Tang chronicles that state that in 702 CE, the Tang court received a message notifying them that the land previously known as 倭 (Wa) changed its name to 日本. This change came about the rise of the Yamato clan, as a matter of fact it is believed that at first the characters 日本 were ate-ji (Chinese characters arbitrarily stuck to a Japanese word with no regard to reading or meaning) and were read as Yamato. All records show that 日本 was chosen because Japan was the land closest to the rising sun. Early readings of 日本 were belied to be Nippon or Jippon.
By itself, 本 in modern Chinese is used as a counter for words, but it did (and still does) also mean “origin” in compounds. See 本能 (Běnnéng – instinct) or 本源 (* Běnyuán* – source/origin.)
By the way, it’s true that Japanese history is regularly punctuated by civil wars, but the land that roughly corresponds to modern Japan (Honshu - Shikoku - Kyushu) was united several times since the 8th century, the last times being arguably in 1590, a few years before the American declaration of independence.
The Mandarin name for Japan is Ribenguo, ‘sun origin country’. The character for origin 本 literally means ‘root’: it shows a tree’s roots extending below the level of the ground.
In the old Wade-Giles romanization of Mandarin, you can see the origin of the name Japan more easily: instead of Ri-ben, the same characters 日本 used to be romanized as Jih-pen. The word for country, guo, can be detected in Marco Polo’s version *Cipangu *(remember that in Italian the letter c before i is pronounced like English ch).
Sorry, typo, should read: counter for books.
Egypt, from Greek Αἰγύπτος Aigyptos, originated as the Egyptian phrase ḥwt-k3-Ptḥ ‘Estate of the Ka (spirit) of Ptah (creator god)’, which was the name for the main Ptah temple complex in Memphis, the center of his cultus, and by extension the whole city of Memphis, and by extension the whole country. The Arabic form of this name, قبط Qubṭ, is the origin of the name Copt.
Cute. Real cute. (That is, assuming you meant to post it that way and didn’t just hit “post” by accident.)
The reason it’s cute is that Oregon is the whole-nine-yards of state names. That is, there’s lots of ideas of its origin (most patently wrong) but no one really knows the origin.
“Honduras” means “deeps” (as in, the kinds of places you spend 20 minutes in). Indeed, there is a deep trench off the Caribbean coast of Honduras – it’s the boundary between the Caribbean plate (Chortis terrane, specifically) and what you might call part of the North American plate (Maya terrane, specifically). You can see the suture continue as two curving, parallel valleys which cut right across Guatemala (one contains its longest river, the Motagua). The line gets fuzzy and complicated in western Guatemala, and finally meets the Pacific plate in several spots depending on your criteria.
Some years ago, a guy made a strong claim about the origin of the name. It just did not seem right to me – not the specifics of the theory but the temerity of it. I was just short of indignant. No one knows for sure whence the name, and that is as it ought to be. Some uncertainties are just meant to be. Now, if only the rest of the country could figure out how to pronounce it …
That’s the ch in chocolate, not the other ones (hey, I’ve run into three different pronunciations of the digraph, but I still haven’t heard anybody ask for some kokolate).
España comes from Hispania and this from the greek Hesperia (which I can’t spell right), but I’ve never heard anything about where Hesperia sprang from. The name used to refer to the Iberian Peninsula; the only time “Hispania” has been fully united (even if it was as a personal union) since the Muslim invasion of the Goth Kingdom of Toledo was under Phillip II.