RE: Place names in foreign languages

From: Marco.Cimarosti@icl.com
Date: Mon Oct 11 1999 - 14:51:05 EDT


>[Alain] To place the debate on a less Euro-centric point of view, I am
>particularly proud that my city and my state was given a Chinese name (by
>phonetic proximity) that has a special meaning in Mandarin.
> Québec = Kui Bei Ke [the victor of the Great North]

Lucky guy you are! My city's Chinese name is:
   Milan = Mi-Lan [rice-orchid]

That is even sillier than Leg-Horn...

Ciao. Marco

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Alain [SMTP:alb@sct.gouv.qc.ca]
> Sent: 1999 October 11, Monday 17.59
> To: Unicode List
> Subject: Re: Place names in foreign languages
>
> À 08:03 1999-10-11 -0700, Doug Ewell a écrit :
> >John Cowan wrote:
> >
> >> Marco.Cimarosti@icl.com scripsit:
> >>
> >>> In Italy people are proud when their cities (e.g. Roma=Rome,
> >>> Milano=Milan, Torino=Turin) have traditional names in other
> >>> languages, especially if they are smaller cities with a long history
> >>> (e.g Mantova=Mantua, Siracusa=Syracuse). On the other hand, people
> >>> are very disappointed to discover that their cities (e.g. Bologna,
> >>> Bari, Cagliari, Monza) are called the same abroad, as if they "din't
> >>> deserve an English name", like small province towns.
>
> [John]
> >> How about Livorno = English Leghorn?
>
> [Doug]
> >Residents of Livorno should be especially proud, since their city has
> >not only an English name, but an exceptionally silly one at that.
>
>
> [Alain] To place the debate on a less Euro-centric point of view, I am
> particularly proud that my city and my state was given a Chinese name (by
> phonetic proximity) that has a special meaning in Mandarin.
>
> Québec = Kui Bei Ke [the victor of the Great North]
> city of Québec = Kui Bei Ke Shi
> [the city of the victor of the Great North]
>
> Much can be said about this name... In Algonquian languages, it means
> "where the waters narrow" [personal comment: the St.Lawrence River narrows
> to 3 km wide only in front of the city (; ]...
>
> A legend says that the French geographer Samuel de Champlain (the same who
> invented the "loch" method, one of the first methods to determine
> longitude), the founder of the city in 1608, when he arrived at this
> strait, would also have said in old French: « Qué bec ! » (« Quel bec ! »,
> in mordern French, which means: « What a beak! » -- the same meaning as
> the
> Amerindian denomination, from another point of view).
>
> Names bear a lot of humanity, indeed...
>
> Alain LaBonté
> Québec



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