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Re: Big Six Revisited... again :/

From:Herman Miller <hmiller@...>
Date:Friday, June 23, 2000, 2:50
On Thu, 22 Jun 2000 06:46:37 CDT, Danny Wier <dawier@...> wrote:

>France: _Furansia_ >Ireland: _Irlandia_ >fax: _fakusu_ >Pope John Paul II: _Papa Yohani-Paulu 2 [dua]_ >Microsoft: _Maikurosofutu_ >Washington: _Waxintonu_ >Texas: _Tekusasu_ >Mexico: _Mehiko_ >Internet: _Internetu_ >to download: _daunlodi_ >strike: _isturaiku_ > >Somehow these words look Japanese to me.
Some of these are pretty close to Japanese (Furansu, fakkusu, Maikurosofuto, Washinton, Tekisasu). Japanese actually borrowed the English word "strike" twice: one version (sutoraiki) for "going on strike", and the other (sutoraiku) as used in baseball. (Or maybe the other way around.) In some of my languages, I try to use some version of the native name for things like places and languages (e.g., borrowing from "Éire" instead of "Ireland"). I'm starting to break out of that pattern with my latest language, Sagi. It started with countries like Albania and Finland (whose own names for themselves, Shqipëria and Suomi, are not widely used in other languages); the Sagi names for these countries are (for the moment) "halbániya" and "fíntávla". But Germany is still "dóityitávla" (in part because Japanese has "doitsu", and also because words for "German" and "Germany" are so variable in other languages). Incidentally, I don't have any consistent pattern for translating "meaningful" elements of names such as "land" in "Deutschland". Sometimes I translate them, as in "dóityitávla", but other names are untranslated (e.g., "sieraleóna", "Sierra Leone"; "kodivuára", "Côte d'Ivoire"). -- languages of Azir------> ----<http://www.io.com/~hmiller/languages.html>--- hmiller (Herman Miller) "If all Printers were determin'd not to print any @io.com email password: thing till they were sure it would offend no body, \ "Subject: teamouse" / there would be very little printed." -Ben Franklin