What Mandarin implies about the nature of the US, UK, France, and Bangladesh. And some others. (But maybe nothing at all.)

Here is a bit of totally spurious — but also fascinating — linguistic analysis of a language I don’t speak a single work of.  Mandarin.

In a lull yesterday I was

flipping through my notebook, which, being purchased in Africa

, was made in China.  At the beginning there is all that practical information that nobody ever uses: calling codes, time zones.  It also lists most countries in English and Mandarin.

So here’s something: what do China, the US, UK, France, Germany, Thailand, South Korea, and Bangladesh have in common?  Their Mandarin terms all end with this character: 国.

This situation is ripe for psuedo-analysis.

I sense some tension in your stroke there.  Would you like to talk about that?

国, it turns out, means “state”.  Or “country” or something.  So the names of all these countries (and only these) are in the form of “America-land” or “France-land”.  Or, um, “Thailand”.

And that just begs the question of what the preceding character in

each word means by itself.  It’s like starting with “Netherlands”, subtracting the “land” and being left with “nether”, and realizing that the at some point people thought that the Netherlands was a very low country.  Which is to say that it doesn’t really mean anything about how people think of the Netherlands, but is still sort of interesting.

(Alternatively, it could be like starting with “Ireland”, taking off the “land” and being left with “ire”, and believing that someone once thought that Ireland was a country of angry people.  Which is to say that it would be wrong.  Still, I’m going to go ahead with this anyway.)

So here is each of those countries, the Mandarin term, the term that precedes “国”, and a translation of what that term means (according to Google Translate, of course).  In most cases the term also refers to the country, as an adjective, but it has these additional meanings.

So isn’t this fascinating?  I would love to know how these associations came about.

By the way, wiktionary.org gives some interesting information about the ideograms.  So 美, the leading character in “United States”, which means “beautiful, pleasing”, is a combination of the ideograms for “goat” and “person”, meaning a person with a goat head-dress, which I guess was considered beautiful by someone, somewhere.  (But probably not in the US.)

Also interesting in a food-for-jumped-conclusions sort of way, if you do a Google image search for 国, the symbol for “country”, you get lots of pictures of national heroes, not pictures of maps or flags or other depersonalized symbols of state.