I love the *Lawland* (Fa Guo for the curious) but how did Belgium become *Billytime*?
Russia – > Russia 🤯
Wow. A lot of these countries love orchids.
Ice Island makes more sense 🤣
Bulgaria seems NOT legit.
Austria sure was a land profit for one painter 😂
Petition to have new national flairs named after this map.
Love your orchid?
Orchids, orchids everywhere! And also, Very lucky soldiers. On a country that hasn’t seen war for what, 300 years?
it’s ***BILLYTIME***
As a Chinese speaker, I can confirm that – although I could nitpick some of the translations – this is largely accurate.
Bing Chilling Luo Horse Nun Ya Bing Chilling
those are oddly sounding quite good, seems like they were made with sense of romanticism towards europe
Nun Ya? Nunya business!
“Lotus Orchid”? “Billytime?”
This reads like an awesome hallucination to me.
I love that you have Rub Accent Brother, Persia Nun-ya, and ***Billytime***, and then you’ve just got Russia
West Classtooth is a saint !
Considering current state of affairs, White Russia truly checks out.
What’s up with the orchids?
love east turkestan from turkey 🙁
Very lucky soldiers 🫠😂
Moral land – yes, historically they have been very moral throughout the ages
turkey is listening to you.
Needs more jpeg, I can almost read some names.
A lot of these names are not really meant to be translated? They are Chinese transliteration rather than translations. Xi Ban Ya 西班牙 for Spain is just choosing three Chinese characters that *sound like* España rather than being intended to mean “West Class Tooth”.
Trying to think of a good analogy the other way round and failing, so here is a bad analogy instead: 习近平 is romanized as Xi Jin Ping, if other Latin characters were chosen to transliterate the name e.g. She Gin Ping it would literally mean she (female pronoun) gin (delicious alcohol) ping (Internet latency).
Croatia – Crow to Asia?
This seems like a bit different pronunciation
Moral- land, pffff
“Where do you live?”
“Nunya.”
“Nunya what?”
With what translator? Couldnt replicate it.
Lovesand is really accurate, but unfortunately our sand can be loved only 2-3 months a year.
Estonia:
LOVESAND NUN-YA ??
>Very lucky soldiers
>Not so lucky navy
Victory Gram Republic? Got me curious
捷克共和国
If I split the characters in Google translate, I get “Fast gram republic”, where “republic” can be further split into three characters, “common and country”.
Google translate actually offers “defeat” as an alternative for the gram character. The gram seems to have the meaning of the measure of weight.
If I separate the “fast” character, the rest translate as “Republic of Croatia”.
If I separate the last two, the first part translates as “Czech Communism”. If I separate the “fast” off that group, the remaining two translate as “KCP”.
Finally, the “fast” and “gram” together translate as “Czech Republic”, but from the phonetics, it looks like it sounds as [Jiékè]. 勝克 (Victory gram) phonetics are [Shèng kè]. I wonder which one is really used, as both could sound somewhat similar to České?
Why would they call Bulgaria “insurance profit”?
AFAIK, this is not about any particular idea they have of the country most of the time. Instead, they looked for chinese characters and put them in order so that pronouncing them produces the name of the country. Of course this means that the names are nonsense if taken as their meaning.
I want Orchid Union
As a Chinese speaker I’d like to point out that names of countries in Chinese often contain no meaning. It’s a direct phonetic translation, i.e. we pick a combination of characters to mimic the sounds. However in Chinese, characters always have meanings which allows this “backward translation” to take place.
Many countries end with “land” which is usually given the characteristic “兰, lan”, of course “兰” means orchid but in the context of a foreign name, it doesn’t actually have any physical meaning. But this is how you end up with so many orchids in this map.
I’m curious about insurance + profit-ya (Bulgaria)
Explanation for all the “orchids” is Chinese han character [兰](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E5%85%B0) [lán] which means orchid but is used for representing the “-land” part in the names of countries. What comes to my country Finland, I would prefer if they’ve used the Finnish name, *Suomi*, as the starting point. That might have produced “所 谧” which could be translated as the more appropriate “quiet place”.
It’s Billytime!
What do ”glasstooth” refer to? Also ”grapetooth”?
This gets posted every few months.
And there are small grains of truth to this, but this isn’t really true.
Most countries in Europe are transliterated (except Iceland), and there are just characters you use to transliterate. No one in China or Taiwan thinks any of this when they say country names, nor does it reflect what those countries were perceived as.
44 comments
I love the *Lawland* (Fa Guo for the curious) but how did Belgium become *Billytime*?
Russia – > Russia 🤯
Wow. A lot of these countries love orchids.
Ice Island makes more sense 🤣
Bulgaria seems NOT legit.
Austria sure was a land profit for one painter 😂
Petition to have new national flairs named after this map.
Love your orchid?
Orchids, orchids everywhere! And also, Very lucky soldiers. On a country that hasn’t seen war for what, 300 years?
it’s ***BILLYTIME***
As a Chinese speaker, I can confirm that – although I could nitpick some of the translations – this is largely accurate.
Bing Chilling Luo Horse Nun Ya Bing Chilling
those are oddly sounding quite good, seems like they were made with sense of romanticism towards europe
Nun Ya? Nunya business!
“Lotus Orchid”? “Billytime?”
This reads like an awesome hallucination to me.
I love that you have Rub Accent Brother, Persia Nun-ya, and ***Billytime***, and then you’ve just got Russia
West Classtooth is a saint !
Considering current state of affairs, White Russia truly checks out.
What’s up with the orchids?
love east turkestan from turkey 🙁
Very lucky soldiers 🫠😂
Moral land – yes, historically they have been very moral throughout the ages
turkey is listening to you.
Needs more jpeg, I can almost read some names.
A lot of these names are not really meant to be translated? They are Chinese transliteration rather than translations. Xi Ban Ya 西班牙 for Spain is just choosing three Chinese characters that *sound like* España rather than being intended to mean “West Class Tooth”.
Trying to think of a good analogy the other way round and failing, so here is a bad analogy instead: 习近平 is romanized as Xi Jin Ping, if other Latin characters were chosen to transliterate the name e.g. She Gin Ping it would literally mean she (female pronoun) gin (delicious alcohol) ping (Internet latency).
Croatia – Crow to Asia?
This seems like a bit different pronunciation
Moral- land, pffff
“Where do you live?”
“Nunya.”
“Nunya what?”
With what translator? Couldnt replicate it.
Lovesand is really accurate, but unfortunately our sand can be loved only 2-3 months a year.
Estonia:
LOVESAND NUN-YA ??
>Very lucky soldiers
>Not so lucky navy
Victory Gram Republic? Got me curious
捷克共和国
If I split the characters in Google translate, I get “Fast gram republic”, where “republic” can be further split into three characters, “common and country”.
Google translate actually offers “defeat” as an alternative for the gram character. The gram seems to have the meaning of the measure of weight.
If I separate the “fast” character, the rest translate as “Republic of Croatia”.
If I separate the last two, the first part translates as “Czech Communism”. If I separate the “fast” off that group, the remaining two translate as “KCP”.
Finally, the “fast” and “gram” together translate as “Czech Republic”, but from the phonetics, it looks like it sounds as [Jiékè]. 勝克 (Victory gram) phonetics are [Shèng kè]. I wonder which one is really used, as both could sound somewhat similar to České?
Why would they call Bulgaria “insurance profit”?
AFAIK, this is not about any particular idea they have of the country most of the time. Instead, they looked for chinese characters and put them in order so that pronouncing them produces the name of the country. Of course this means that the names are nonsense if taken as their meaning.
I want Orchid Union
As a Chinese speaker I’d like to point out that names of countries in Chinese often contain no meaning. It’s a direct phonetic translation, i.e. we pick a combination of characters to mimic the sounds. However in Chinese, characters always have meanings which allows this “backward translation” to take place.
Many countries end with “land” which is usually given the characteristic “兰, lan”, of course “兰” means orchid but in the context of a foreign name, it doesn’t actually have any physical meaning. But this is how you end up with so many orchids in this map.
I’m curious about insurance + profit-ya (Bulgaria)
Explanation for all the “orchids” is Chinese han character [兰](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E5%85%B0) [lán] which means orchid but is used for representing the “-land” part in the names of countries. What comes to my country Finland, I would prefer if they’ve used the Finnish name, *Suomi*, as the starting point. That might have produced “所 谧” which could be translated as the more appropriate “quiet place”.
It’s Billytime!
What do ”glasstooth” refer to? Also ”grapetooth”?
This gets posted every few months.
And there are small grains of truth to this, but this isn’t really true.
Most countries in Europe are transliterated (except Iceland), and there are just characters you use to transliterate. No one in China or Taiwan thinks any of this when they say country names, nor does it reflect what those countries were perceived as.
Billy time
Wipes tears in Braveish :’)