The Atlas of True Names
by tdaxp ~ January 4th, 2009
Catholicgauze has an interview with the author of The Atlas of True Names, which is a series of maps in which proper place-names are replaced by what those names (may) actually mean.
In the U.S., The Atlas of True Names is available from Kalimedia, though an Amazon UK page exists as well. More on the Atlas is available from Language Hat, Language Log, and Strange Maps.
Tim, Based on the traditional laws of the United...
January 7th, 2009 at 12:46 pm
A variant of this that would also be neat–an atlas of Mandarin place names for different parts of the world literally translated into English.
From what I gather, writing non-Chinese names in Chinese is typically done by putting Chinese words together that sound vaguely like the syllables in the original word. As such, America becomes “May Gua” or “beautiful nation”. England becomes “Ying Gua” (Brave Nation) and so on. It would also be interesting to see what those names become had different tones been chosen:P
January 7th, 2009 at 1:07 pm
That would be fascinating!
Siberia (西伯利亞) literally means West-Sire-Profit-Asia, but I guess you could translate it as “Western Lord’s Profitable Asia.”
Which almost makes sense!
South Dakota becomes “South Quick Section He State” – harder to make sense of.
America is indeed Beautiful Country in Chinese (美国), though in Japanese it is 米国, or Rice-Country!
zen picked up a link to this page [1], by the way.
[1] http://zenpundit.com/?p=2979