In Polish, “United States” is Stany Zjednoczone, but the acronym is USA, even though that doesn’t match up at all
But Unia Europejska is UE
Um… It is an acronym my guy. How do you think French people write USA?
ITT: Americans struggling to comprehend languages other than their own
To detract from the confusion the European Union is Union Européenne (UE) in French.
I thought it would be so funny if any of the EU employees would go to a bar in Brussels (majority French-speaking) and have an aneurysm explaining what they do to a local in broken French. Not that it would ever happen… but it would be funny
So “Etats” is “State”… just written backwards?
“États” is “States” ☝️🤓
Ah alors tu as découvert comment est-ce que le français fonctionne. Désolé pas désolé
ah so you have discovered in your comment how french functions.
what’s Desole?
Sorry… it says sorry not sorry 😅😅
is the rest of my translation correct?
Not too bad overall if you don’t know any French though!
no i learnt french in freshman year college… 15 years ago
It quickly gets dissolved into the abyss of the mind, I get that! I lived in Japan for 4 years and can only remember a few useless bits.
No, but close. Comment means how.
So you have discovered how french functions.
comment means how
damn should have guessed
What a supercalifragilisticexpialidocious statement!
That’s why they use EUA (États-Unis d’Amérique) for the abbreviation.
I have to say I had never encountered this abbreviated form
But we tend to forget de A so just ÉU
In Spanish you can see EEUU for «Estados Unidos». The letters are doubled because they’re plural.
I’ve always wondered why spanish speakers online use EEUU for the US. I once asked a friend of mine and he said “that’s just the way it is”; this is a much better explanation lol
A bit like how we used to call the CCCP the USSR?
The official name for the country was “Unión de Repúblicas Socialistas Soviéticas”, hence URSS
You sure the official name wasn’t spelled in Cyrillic instead of Latin With Dumb Shit Over It?
I am forever annoyed that every language has the audacity to rename other countries to something that is not their name.
Germany? It’s called Deutschland
Spain? España.
Russia? Rossiya.
It’s everywhere and it’s weird.
Because no one can say Magyarország, and it’s easier to make fun of being Hungary for Turkey.
Dunno, as a German, I’d find it ahistorical if everybody was using “Deutschland” … the nation-state as an idea, and a unified nation state, are relatively young. Before that, what we call Deutschland today was a mess. It’s no surprise that romance languages use some or another variation of “Allemagne” … the german dialect spoken around the southwestern border is still called “Allemannisch” even in Germany, same with “Saxon” and the variations “Saksa” to the east …
I kinda prefer it the way it is in this case, honestly …
And while we’re at it, why do languages have the audacity to use ANY words different from other languages!
See how this sounds?
I’m annoyed by the inverse. I speak English, why shouldn’t I use English words? I use English words for everything else in life. Does every other country say “United States of America”?
“Because that’s what I call it and so should every other language!”
See how that sounds?
And honestly, some of them do just translate (more or less). Like España vs Spain, pretty much any Spanish word that starts with es(consonant) drops the leading e when translated to English (estado, estudiante, and escuela for state, student, and school). We also don’t have the same o/a suffices. So that leaves spañ, except I don’t think any Spanish word ends with ñ (it makes a “ny” sound to bridge with the next letter, for those who don’t know) and Spain comes pretty darn close.
Not too mention that pronunciations and even alphabets are bound to change. Just how much do you want to stay authentic? Because if I start talking about عُمان (Google says that means Oman in Arabic, and looks about right from what I remember seeing on license plates there) I’m going to lose a lot of people.
Asked my half-Japanese wife how to say “Japan” in Japanese. First she said “Japan”, then “Nippon” pronounced “Nihon” (silent P), then “Nippongo” (silent P), or something I can’t type exactly. She also wrote down “Wakarami” with a note “I don’t know”. She was born and bred in the Philippines, so there’s that twist.
Now I’m totally confused, fuck it, Japan it is.
So yeah, how authentic do you want to be?! Bitching about such things is a sign I can’t take one seriously.
I’m not insensitive. Lady at Lowe’s saw my Ukraine patch and said, “Slava Ukraini!” I said it back, but came on here to ask for proper pronunciation.
And Turkey is fucking Turkey. Fuck the haters.
Japan? AnimeLand
I learned not that long ago the Japanese refer to Japan as Nippon, and that stuck with me
Russia == Rossiya doesn’t belong in that list.
Spain and españa are also just cognates
Im happy with it. Better than 中国 or .مصر No idea how to read nor how to speak it out.
A transliteration would be fine, eg Nihon, Zhongguo
Is that what my wife was trying to say?
https://old.lemmy.world/comment/20033856
Fuck it. Japan it is.
In Serbo-Croatian, the acronym is САД. It transliterates to SAD.
Shouldn’t Spanish have the same problem? I’ve seen them abbreviate it to EEUU though, which I assume must help prevent confusion?
Same as another user said, in Spanish European Union is Unión Europea, so abbreviates to UE, and you’re right about EEUU, because it’s the United States
The French and acronyms. You got NATO, but the French translate it so they call it OTAN. Directly translated, they also just say the ‘States United’.
Anyone’s guess who did word order first to find out why French is a silly language.
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French predates English.
Also, bold calling a language silly in english
This comment belongs right in a badling sublemmy.
I decided to look into this because I was curious.
The unification and regulation of the French language came about in 1653 with the founding of the Académie Française and it actually took a while for the revolutionaries to pivot from “liberty of language” to “the only language in France should be French” English was already established by this time and the vowel shift was basically complete.
According to Wikipedia, Middle French died out in the 17th century while Middle English died out in the 15th. Ergo: Modern English predates Modern French
If we check back farther it seems the two languages developed similarly though the arbitrary divides for each age of language (old, middle, modern) seem to show with English being first by roughly a century.
Of course this is all arbitrary since language doesn’t evolve discretely. However the Wikipedia entries for the oldest Gallo-Romance (precursor to French) is from 842CE, whereas old English poetry dates as early as 650-700CE. Once again suggesting English predates French.
Now there is a difficulty here with French because it originates from Vulgar Latin which could be considered older than English, but I’m not sure many would call it French since lots of European languages branched from Vulgar Latin
As for silliness… yeah no arguments there lol
Neat, I stand corrected.
I doubt the french history teacher I had who taught me that is still alive though.
Japanese sentences (clauses) end with the verb. In Kiswahili/Shimaore a noun is followed by its possessive pronoun (“cup my”, “spirit their”…). Languages are very diverse in that regard
To be fair the same happens in Spanish with most acronyms
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