Moldy Rutabaga
Joined: 01 Jul 2003
Location: Ansan, Korea
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 Posted: Tue Sep 23, 2003 4:31 am Post subject: |
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| Koreans don't have their own name for gorillas and stuff because there are no gorrilas, kangaroos and penguins in Korea. When they first encountered these animals, they just adopted English names. At least thats my take on the situation. |
This is probably the case, although there are exceptions, of course. Linguists trace the origins of languages based on what words they had and what words they had to import. For example, we know something about the geography of the ancient European languages because they had a word for ice floe but not for palm tree. It's also true that not all the animal names are English-derived-- many came from different languages. This is why some weird animal names like moose have no plural.
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| I've always wondered why Korea is Korea and not Hangkuk, why Japan is Japan and not Nippon, why Italy is Italy not Italia and why the hell Australia is Australia and not Hoju |
These are names we give these countries in English, and not necessarily what those countries call themselves-- Germany calls itself Deutschland. Some countries which were very influenced by English culture have adopted the name for them used in NA/Britain (such as Korea). For another view, look at a world map written in Spanish or French and see that in those languages many countries have different names.
Ken:> |
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