Comment on Learning Japanese

• Dicska@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  It’s like calling the entire country of the Netherlands Holland. Holland(ia?) is part of the Netherlands which gave the name of the country in a bunch of languages.

  This is weird, by the way, I just wrote about the exact same thing not too long ago.

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  • gerryflap@feddit.nl ⁨6⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    I can open your link, but as someone who’s Dutch, the way this all works in English is so absurd. Here we call Germany “Duitsland” and they speak “Duits”. This is quite similar to what they say themselves, “Deutschland” and “Deutsch”. We call our country “Nederland” and our language “Nederlands”. This is again similar in German.

    Then why is English “Germany”, “German” and “Holland”/“The Netherlands” and “Dutch”. It’s so silly. There are of course historic reasons, but can’t we all just collectively change it?

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    • tigeruppercut@lemmy.zip ⁨1⁩ ⁨hour⁩ ago

      as someone who’s Dutch, the way this all works in English is so absurd

      Yeah but don’t you say Japan instead of Nihon/Nippon? Every language does this to a certain extent.

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    • Lumidaub@feddit.org ⁨3⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      Face it, even the Anglophones know what you speak is simply Drunk German. :P

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    • Dicska@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      I think we can - but just see how many people in your country call Turkey Türkiye (they made a request back in 2022) - and that was just one country, not all.

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      • samus12345@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨hour⁩ ago

        Instructions unclear, I now eat türkiye for Thanksgiving.

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      • Lumidaub@feddit.org ⁨3⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

        They already call it Turkije which is a lot closer to Türkiye.

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