Four Types of Kanji (2019)

Re:Four Types of Kanji (2019) by glandium on Thursday December 03, 2020 @03:13AM (#25286733)

亜米利加 America, is where 米国 comes from (it couldn't be abbreviated as 亜 because that would have been confusing with e.g. 亜細亜 (Asia)).

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Re:Four Types of Kanji (2019) by mytailorisrich on Thursday December 03, 2020 @08:02AM (#25288406)

I think the somewhat confusing thing here is that Japanese can pronounce the same kanji in different ways, from 'purely local Japanese' to variants of old Chinese pronunciation.

米国 "beikoku" sounds like a strange choice for "America". But then in 亜米利加 it's pronounced "mei", which does indeed explain the choice better.

Chinese use 美 'mei' for America and so 美国 'meiguo' is the US.

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