[Multilingual Monday] Language Nerd Olympics
So, yeah, I sat through the parade of nations during the Olympics this year. Why? Just to hear the country names ratttled off one by one in French, English, and Mandarin Chinese. I admit, the transliteration system fascinates me, mainly in part because of its cumbersomeness, causing a writer to slam multiple characters together that really have no meaning whatsoever -- two prime examples are 马耳他, mǎ ěr tā, "Malta" and 塞内加尔 sēi nèi jiā ěr, "Senegal". If reading these semantically, they have bizarre meanings like "Horse Ear Him" or "Clog Inside Add You". The sound "ěr" always catches me off guard, especially because it always makes the speaker sound unusually excited because of the tone -- Senegal, to my native English years, sounded like "Sei nei GARRR!!!!!".
There are very few real translations in any of the country names -- the only one I can think of is Iceland becoming 冰岛, bīng dǎo, "Ice Island", and then there are partial translations -- 马其顿共和国, mǎ qí dùn gòng hé guó, "Republic of Macedonia" (Macedonia being the obvious transliteration, the rest translating "republic" -- don't even ask about the even more cumbersome "Former Yugoslav Republic" part).
I'm still wondering if the name for Portugal -- 葡萄牙, bèi táo yǎ, is from Cantonese or some other dialect, since that doesn't seem to come all that close to sounding out "Portugal" in Mandarin, and the name has just been used for so long that no one's bothered to come up with new characters? I don't know ...
(More to come -- I'm at work. :: laugh ::)
There are very few real translations in any of the country names -- the only one I can think of is Iceland becoming 冰岛, bīng dǎo, "Ice Island", and then there are partial translations -- 马其顿共和国, mǎ qí dùn gòng hé guó, "Republic of Macedonia" (Macedonia being the obvious transliteration, the rest translating "republic" -- don't even ask about the even more cumbersome "Former Yugoslav Republic" part).
I'm still wondering if the name for Portugal -- 葡萄牙, bèi táo yǎ, is from Cantonese or some other dialect, since that doesn't seem to come all that close to sounding out "Portugal" in Mandarin, and the name has just been used for so long that no one's bothered to come up with new characters? I don't know ...
(More to come -- I'm at work. :: laugh ::)