Re: Big Six Revisited... again :/

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").

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