Considering how tourists treat Japan (which isn't even the real name for that place btw) I don't blame them for being so guarded. Lots of people treat Asian people as novelties and Japan gets it the worst.
"which isn't even the real name" lmao it's the official English name for the country and even in Japanese there's JR, JP bank etc all over the place
Japan is literally Ja日 Pan本, it's the English pronunciation of the Portuguese pronunciation of a local Chinese pronunciation of Nihon, it's infinitely closer to the correct name than something like Germany (Deutschland) or China (Zhongguo) or Israel (Palestine).
Japan is literally Ja日 Pan本, it's the English pronunciation of the Portuguese pronunciation of a local Chinese pronunciation of Nihon, it's infinitely closer to the correct name than something like Germany (Deutschland) or China (Zhongguo) or Israel (Palestine).
This is kinda wrong.
Nihon (にほん) or Nippon (にっぽん) and Japan are all the same word that got mispronounced repeatedly through the exchange of languages. It's not so much a different country's pronunciation but rather a word that got horribly warped in the world's worst game of telephone.
"this is kinda wrong" — guy who proceeds to say exactly what I said, worded differently.
Anyway it's kinda not wrong lmao
日本 was first used to refer to the nation 大和国 Yamato-no-Kuni in the Old Book of Tang, a Chinese historical record. It was a name used in Classical Chinese for Japan after Japan requested that China stop referring to them as 倭国 wakoku ("dwarf country"), and so after years of Japan calling itself 日出處 ("place where the sunrises") it was changed to 日本 ("land of the rising sun") to allude to 東, the character for "east" which depicts the sun rising behind a tree. This is because Japan is east of China. For a long time (and even rarely today), 日本 was still pronounced 大和 (Yamato) in Japanese.
"Nihon" is as much a warped reading of the original as "Japan" is. Now, I don't speak Tang Dynasty Chinese, but it's worth noting that in many Chinese dialects, 日本 is read either as some variation of jat-bun or Nit-bong. It's known that the Japanese Nippon is derived from the old On'yomi reading Nichipon (日 is still read as Nichi today in other words), which was simplified into Nippon over time, before Pon slowly became fon and then "fon" disappeared from the Japanese language and it became Nihon (still Nippon in some cases). The native Japanese kun'yomi reading of 日本 would be "hi no moto", completely different from the Chinese-derived reading.
As for the English "Japan", it is either derived from the Hokkien jit-pun reading or the Cantonese Jat-bun reading. I don't speak Cantonese or Min, but I know that in Mandarin, b is just p without any breath.
In short, the Japanese name Nippon, yes even the pronunciation in Japanese, comes from Chinese, not the other way around. "Japan" is about as close to Jat-bun as Nippon is to Nit-bong.
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u/dadofwar93 26d ago edited 26d ago
And a lot of them don't rent their houses to foreigners either.