Sounds like a dumb question, right? But Germany is “de”, Spain is “es”, Croatia is “hr”, Switzerland is “ch”. Greeks don’t call Greece “Greece”, they call it Hellas, and the official name of the country, even in English is the Hellenic Republic, so why isn’t it “he” or some other abbreviation of Hellas, rather than an abbreviation of the foreign (to them) name Greece?
The same reason that the code for Finland is “fi.” More people know it as “Finland” than “Suomi.”
Guess: it would be confusing since there’s no “h” equivalent in Greek. Thus “.he” wouldn’t be obvious to English speakers or Greek speakers and is thus sort of a worst of both worlds.
Wikipeida mentions the Greek gov’t tried to get the two character string “eta lambda” (the first two letters of Hellas in Greek) assigned to them, but were denied since it was too similar to an existing assingment.
No direct answer, but more info: It seems that when they were first assigned, a large majority of the two-letter country TLDs were based off the ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 standard for two-letter country codes. The group that maintains ISO 3166 consists of a few random countries and Internet bodies.
That list was first published in 1974. So I guess the question is why they chose GR way back then.
I wouldn’t say a majority, but all of them as far as I know. Which aren’t, and why? Anyroads, why invent a new wheel by not using the already existent standardised codes? I work a lot with country and language codes and the geniuses at the Library of Congress that first devised the system did, for some reason that escapes me, not use ISO 3166 and ISO 639, but invented their own codes and it’s confusing as hell.
While that is true, both Finnish & Swedish are official languages in Finland and the Swedish word for Finland is Finland.
Offhand, I know that the ISO code for the UK is GB, while the TLD is .uk.
The one that comes to mind is .UK (intead of .GB).
The wikipedia page says there are others, but I compared the table in Excel and could not find any… so dunno.
The others are countries which no longer exist, didn’t exist, or didn’t have their own in the ISO list (eg., Ascension Island, which shares an ISO code with St. Helena and Tristan de Cunha, but has its own domain.)
By this logic, there’s no equivalent to any English/Latin letter in Greek; no “a”, only “alpha”, no “b”, only “beta”, etc.
I would say “eta” is definitely an “h” equivalent in Greek. The lower-case glyph has changed appearance a little bit, but the letter H/h/“aitch” is very clearly derived from Η/η/“eta”.
They didn’t apply for “eta lambda” (ηλ); they applied for “epsilon lambda” (ελ). As in “Ελλάδα”.
(Or “Ελλάς”)
Well, it’s all Greek to me.