Re:Jōyō kanji variants: The curious case of 叱 and 𠮟 (2016)
by Manishearth on Sunday November 12, 2017 @06:41AM
(#15680540)
IIRC 米国 (mi guo / "rice country") is used in Taiwan as well. The other Chinese word for America (美国 / mei guo / "beautiful country") is also a phonetic thing.
(I used to think 美国 was descriptive since it didn't sound phonetic, until I came across 米国 and was confused as to why anyone would describe the US as "rice country", and then I learned that both were phonetic, but for the "me" in "america")
Re:Jōyō kanji variants: The curious case of 叱 and 𠮟 (2016)
by Dylan16807 on Sunday November 12, 2017 @10:41AM
(#15681192)
You call it a misconception and then post an example that's extremely easy to understand? I'm confused.
That's a common misconception (on the level of "katakana is for loan words"):
I switched my televi off and rode my autobike from my mansion to the cleaning to pick up my Y shirt because my car's front glass broke. On the way home I stopped at the conveni.
Televi: TV Autobike: motorcycle Mansion: apartment Cleaning: dry cleaning Front glass: windshield Conveni: Conveni-ence store
> Chinese loanwords are more garbled, with different methods of assigning them random chinese characters.
This was standard in Japanese too (ateji). It is more common now to just make a loanword, but if someone doesn't learn them they may be confused about why Japanese abbreviate America as "rice".
米 US from 亜米利加 A ME RI KA (亜 is for Asia) eg 米軍 (US military) or 米ドル (US dollar)