Chinese Character for England/English

[Andy_S]

Request for assistance from Chinese readers:

Can anyone tell me the eymology (ie origin of the word) and original meaning of the Chinese character for England/English?

TIA.

[GrahamB]

I think it translates into Chinese as "drunken footballer"

[Darth Rock&Roll]

I think it's something like "enslaving opium dealer" or something like that.

[edededed]

Off the top of my head, originally they used various Chinese characters to try to approximate the sound "England" or "English." I think one version was: 英吉利 (in an older Chinese dialect, it would sound sort of like "Ing-gi-li"). Later, they just took the first character to represent English in general (the meaning has nothing to do with the current "English" connotation, but means something good, like "hero").

The same sort of process was done to get the Chinese words for most European countries; usually a more-or-less flattering word was chosen for each (USA: beautiful, Germany: moral; France: lawful).

[Andy_S]

Eded:

Thank you for that. My understanding is that England translates as "the brave country/the heroic country."

(Darth can shag off with his typically misunderstood, PC Asian Study mis-focus and Graham - well you are about halfway there, pal) but I have never quite understood why the Yanks were called "The Flowery Flags."

[mixjourneyman]

Yingguo right?
I was told the various meanings in a mandarin class I'm taking. I think Ed pretty much addressed it.
The funny thing is that Canada is Jiannada, which has no specific meaning, but just sounds like the country's name.

[qiphlow]

jiannada? that's the best thing that could have happened to canada ever. awesome.

[bluesky]

so, the ying character for ying guo (England in Chinese) is the chinese character for heroic. However, that is a coincidence.

America is ah-mei-jian-li-guo, which they shorten to mei-guo, which give rise to this "beautiful" country translation.

America is also know as "hua-qi" guo which translate to flowery flag or many colorful pattern flag country.

take your pick.

[edededed]

There were lots of transliterations running around ("guo" was not stuck on them, they added that later when only one character was used to denote a character).

China was generally nicer (or more accurate?) in their final choice of characters than Japan; take your pick:

America (美 beauty or 米 rice)
Germany (德 morality or 獨 alone)
France (法 law or 佛 Buddha)
Russia (俄 sudden or 露 exposure)

England gets the same for both, as do older countries like Korea, etc. Japan calls itself 和 (harmony) in various compound words, but noone else calls them that

Canada is too young to get a single character moniker!

[mixjourneyman]

The good thing is that JIANADA makes a great war chant...


JIANADA... JIANADA!!!

[edededed]

For some reason, the "k" sound in Chinese degraded to a "j/ch" sound in recent years (recent, as in last few centuries).

Compare the word for "sword" (in attempted transcriptions of pronunciations):

Cantonese (older Chinese dialect): gim
Korean: ghum
Japanese: keng
Mandarin (newest Chinese dialect): jien

Thus we get words like "jia na da" which no longer are very similar to the foreign words they are approximating.

[Wuyizidi]

There were lots of transliterations running around ("guo" was not stuck on them, they added that later when only one character was used to denote a character).

China was generally nicer (or more accurate?) in their final choice of characters than Japan; take your pick:

America (美 beauty or 米 rice)
Germany (德 morality or 獨 alone)
France (法 law or 佛 Buddha)
Russia (俄 sudden or 露 exposure)

England gets the same for both, as do older countries like Korea, etc. Japan calls itself 和 (harmony) in various compound words, but noone else calls them that

Canada is too young to get a single character moniker!

My father lived in Tianjing and Beijing during WWII - occupied territories by the Japanese. He said after 1943, when the war started not going their way, the anti-allies rhetoric got retched up, and the Japanese added the radical for dog 犬 to the abbreviated character for UK and US in all the newspapers. So instead of 米 for America, it would be a made up character 犬米, and UK would be 犬英.

[Darth Rock&Roll]

I thought that north america in general was called "mei gwa" or "beautiful land".

[mixjourneyman]

I thought that north america in general was called "mei gwa" or "beautiful land".

I think you must mean "Mei Guo", as Mei means beautiful and Guo means country, nation, nationality etc....
Its pretty much strictly applied to the states as far as I know.

[edededed]

Interesting, Wuyizidi, that is something that noone talks about in Japan these days, I guess (Grab the erasers!)

Meigua would be something like beautiful melon