Nation names in Vietnamese fall into two distinct groups:
1. Cognates
2. Names that actually mean something.
For instance, cognates are recognizable, like Thái Lan or Canada. Non-cognates have absolutely no rhyme or reason. Germany is nước Đức, Australia is nước Úc, and Belgium is nước Bỉ. (By the way, "nước" simply means "country.")
America is nước Mỹ. It never occurred to me to ask my instructor what that word actually means. During class, we translated "United States of America." It is Hợp chủng quốc Hoa Kỳ. The first three words literally mean "united states." The interesting part is the last two words. Hoa means "flower," and kỳ means "flag." In Vietnamese, our nation's name literally means "United States of the Floral Flag." Apparently the Vietnamese think we have a busy flag. I never thought of it that way, but as flags go, ours IS a little busy.
The word for America is nước Mỹ. It means "beautiful country." Americans are người Mỹ, or, "people of the beautiful country".
I'll take it.
3 comments:
The fascinating thing is that calling America "My" is also a cognate. It goes back to Cantonese, where "America" was transliterated as 亚美利加 (ya-mei-li-ka); the second character 美 "mei" means "beautiful," and its cognate in Vietnamese is "my." So the "mei-guo" is the abbreviation in Chinese, which apparently nowadays is pretty much the only form you hear. In Korean it's "mi," so the Korean name for America is "Miguk." Apparently that's how the racist term "gook" (for an Asian person) originated during the Korean War. I think the "Flower Flag country" thing also comes from Chinese, although I don't remember where I heard that.
Keep us posted on your adventures in tiếng Việt!
I didn't realize that, but it does make sense in that Vietnamese is at least distantly related to the other major East Asian languages. When I mentioned before that Vietnamese has few cognates I should have clarified that that applies only to the Western languages!
Another interesting tidbit is that the characters and word for America in Chinese (beautiful country), which extended to Vietnam and Korea, but changed in translation in Japan. The characters for "rice" and "beautiful" being very similar, someone in the distant past in Japan apparently missed a stroke and America is referred to as the "Rice Country" in Japanese.
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