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Anglicizing Names Game

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naturalplastic
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20 May 2017, 12:13 pm

IstominFan wrote:
Juan, Ivan and Janko are all variations on the name John and all of these are names of famous tennis players.

The name "Yankees," is a Dutch variant of "John Cheese," a name the Dutch gave the Americans of English descent.

So "Janko," a common Eastern European name, is actually very close to "Yankee."


NEVER heard that about "Yankees".

What I read was that the Native Americans who encountered the Pilgrims and the Puritans and the other early English colonists of New England pronounced the word these strangers called themselves ("English") as "Yen- Ghis". The native American term Yengis became the name for New Englanders: "Yankees". The Dutch settlers of what is now New York State had nothing to do with it.



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24 May 2017, 8:36 pm

Novgorod - Newtown
St. Petersburg - St. Peter's City
Beijing - Northern Capital
Tokyo - Eastern Capital

Also:
Albus Dumbledore - White Bumblebee (albus from Latin, Dumbledore from old English)


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naturalplastic
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27 May 2017, 11:22 am

There is a small city in Italy called "Small City": Urbino .



naturalplastic
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28 May 2017, 10:31 am

Montenegro means "black mountain".

Transylvania means "across the forest".

Portugal derives from the phrase "port of Gaul".



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28 May 2017, 11:03 am

The German city of Munich (München) gets its name from the Old German word for 'Monks'.

In Italian the city is known as 'Monaco', which is Italian for 'Monk'.

The Principality of Monaco on the French Riviera has a different derivation altogether, and the identical spelling is coincidental.



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29 May 2017, 5:13 am

naturalplastic wrote:
There is a small city in Italy called "Small City": Urbino .


A bit of a sidetrack from the topic of this thread, but there's also an Italian town (in Tuscany) called Chiusi, which I've always found quite funny, as when I visited Italy many years ago, half the country seemed to be 'chiuso' (closed). :wink:



naturalplastic
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29 May 2017, 6:31 am

DeepHour wrote:
naturalplastic wrote:
There is a small city in Italy called "Small City": Urbino .


A bit of a sidetrack from the topic of this thread, but there's also an Italian town (in Tuscany) called Chiusi, which I've always found quite funny, as when I visited Italy many years ago, half the country seemed to be 'chiuso' (closed). :wink:


A guy I drank with in college told about traveling through Europe, and said that he "loved every country he went through except Switzerland". In (presumably the French speaking part) he saw a road sign that said "Prudence", and he said with a laugh that that sign "summed up the whole country for me" ( I guess the place was too straight laced for him). The sign meant "be careful" (because of the twisty mountain roads), and is pronounced "prew- DENSE". But it was an unintentional spoof of the whole country for him. Lol!



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22 Jun 2017, 8:52 pm

Yugoslavia - South Slav-Land(?)/ land of the southern Slavs


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DeepHour
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26 Jul 2017, 7:58 pm

naturalplastic wrote:
DeepHour wrote:
naturalplastic wrote:
There is a small city in Italy called "Small City": Urbino .


A bit of a sidetrack from the topic of this thread, but there's also an Italian town (in Tuscany) called Chiusi, which I've always found quite funny, as when I visited Italy many years ago, half the country seemed to be 'chiuso' (closed). :wink:





Also there's an Italian town called Cancello, which is mildly amusing for a similar reason to the previous one.