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This list covers English-language country names with their etymologies. Some of these include notes on indigenous names and their etymologies. Countries in italics are endonyms or no longer exist as sovereign political entities.
From Classical Persian افغان (afğān, “Afghan”), from Bactrian αβαγανο (abagano), first attested in the fourth century CE, most likely a compound of *apāka- (“distant, faraway”), from Proto-Iranian *Hapá, from Proto-Indo-Iranian *Hapá (“away”), from Proto-Indo-European *h₂epó + *-āna (“ethnic group”), from Proto-Indo-European *-nós, thus: "people from a distant land". [1] Various scholars have proposed Sanskrit etymologies since the nineteenth century (especially prior to the 2007 publication of earlier Bactrian attestations for the word), but linguist Johnny Cheung notes that these are "extremely difficult to reconcile" with recent evidence pointing to a Bactrian source.
The etymology of Bangladesh (Country of Bengal) can be traced to the early 20th century, when Bengali patriotic songs, such as Namo Namo Namo Bangladesh Momo by Kazi Nazrul Islam and Aaji Bangladesher Hridoy by Rabindranath Tagore, used the term. [76] The term Bangladesh was often written as two words, Bangla Desh, in the past. Starting in the 1950s, Bengali nationalists used the term in political rallies in East Pakistan.
The exact origin of the word Bangla is unknown, though it is believed to come from "Vanga", an ancient kingdom mentioned in world's largest Epic Mahabharat even Ramayan and geopolitical division on the Ganges delta in the Indian subcontinent. It was located in southern Bengal, with the core region including present-day southern West Bengal (India) and southwestern Bangladesh. The suffix "al" came to be added to it from the fact that the ancient rajas of this land raised mounds of earth 10 feet high and 20 in breadth in lowlands at the foot of the hills which were called "al". From this suffix added to the Bung, the name Bengal arose and gained currency". [77] [78] Support to this view is found in Ghulam Husain Salim's Riyaz-us-Salatin. [79]
Other theories point to a Bronze Age proto-Dravidian tribe, [80] the Austric word "Bonga" (Sun god), [81] and the Iron Age Vanga Kingdom. [81] The Indo-Aryan suffix Desh is derived from the Sanskrit word deśha, which means "land" or "country". Hence, the name Bangladesh means "Land of Bengal" or "Country of Bengal". [82] Sanskrit language influenced the name of Bangladesh. The term Vanga was used in the Sanskrit texts.
The term Bangla denotes both the Bengal region and the Bengali language. The earliest known usage of the term is the Nesari plate in 805 AD. The term Vangaladesa is found in 11th-century South Indian records. [82] [83] The term gained official status during the Sultanate of Bengal in the 14th century. [84] [85] Shamsuddin Ilyas Shah proclaimed himself as the first "Shah of Bangala" in 1342. [84] The word Bangla became the most common name for the region during the Islamic period. The Portuguese referred to the region as Bengala in the 16th century. [86]
The name Pakistan literally means "Land of the Pure" in Urdu and Persian. It was coined in 1933 as Pakstan by Choudhry Rahmat Ali, a Pakistan Movement activist, who published it in his pamphlet Now or Never , [269] using it as an acronym ("thirty million Muslim brethren who live in PAKSTAN") referring to the names of the five northwestern regions of the British Indian Empire: Punjab, Afghania, Kashmir, Sindh, and Baluchistan". [270] [271] [272] The letter i was incorporated to ease pronunciation and form the linguistically correct and meaningful name. [273]
The English word Palestine is derived from the Latin Palestina ("Roman Province of Palestine"), which is derived from the Ancient Greek Παλαιστίνη (Palaistine, "Philistia and surrounding regions"), which is in turn derived from the Hebrew פלשת (Pelesheth, "land of the Philistines") [275]
Uganda is named after the Buganda Kingdom which occupies the central region of the country. The word "Buganda" is derived from "muganda" which means "a bundle" or "united as in a bundle" in the Buganda language. The "Bu-" prefix in Buganda means "land" pronounced with a soft "b" sound. In Swahili it became "Uganda" as Swahili does not have a soft "b" sound. The final pronunciation of Uganda is the English pronunciation. So "Uganda" actually means "land of the united peoples".
In historical linguistics, cognates or lexical cognates are sets of words that have been inherited in direct descent from an etymological ancestor in a common parent language. Because language change can have radical effects on both the sound and the meaning of a word, cognates may not be obvious, and it often takes rigorous study of historical sources and the application of the comparative method to establish whether lexemes are cognate. Cognates are distinguished from loanwords, where a word has been borrowed from another language.
Metathesis is the transposition of sounds or syllables in a word or of words in a sentence. Most commonly, it refers to the interchange of two or more contiguous segments or syllables, known as adjacent metathesis or local metathesis:
The Republic of India has two principal short names, each of which is historically significant, India and Bhārat. A third name, "Hindūstān", is sometimes an alternative name for the region comprising most of the modern Indian states of the Indian Subcontinent when Indians speak among themselves. The usage of "Bhārat", "Hindūstān", or "India" depends on the context and language of conversation.
Etymology is the scientific study of the origin and evolution of a word's semantic meaning across time, including its constituent morphemes and phonemes. It is a subfield of historical linguistics, philology, and semiotics, and draws upon comparative semantics, morphology, pragmatics, and phonetics in order to construct a comprehensive and chronological catalogue of all meanings that a morpheme, phoneme, word, or sign has carried across time.
An endonym is a common, native name for a group of people, individual person, geographical place, language or dialect, meaning that it is used inside a particular group or linguistic community to identify or designate themselves, their homeland, or their language.
In etymology, two or more words in the same language are called doublets or etymological twins or twinlings when they have different phonological forms but the same etymological root. Often, but not always, the words entered the language through different routes. Given that the kinship between words that have the same root and the same meaning is fairly obvious, the term is mostly used to characterize pairs of words that have diverged at least somewhat in meaning. For example, English pyre and fire are doublets with merely associated meanings despite both descending ultimately from the same Proto-Indo-European (PIE) word *péh₂ur.
There are many widely varying names of Germany in different languages, more so than for any other European nation. For example:
An English exonym is a name in the English language for a place, or occasionally other terms, which does not follow the local usage. Exonyms and endonyms are features of all languages, and other languages may have their own exonym for English endonyms, for example Llundain is the Welsh exonym for the English endonym "London".
The name Armenia entered English via Latin, from Ancient Greek Ἀρμενία.
The ethnonyms for the Poles (people) and Poland include endonyms and exonyms. Endonyms and most exonyms for Poles and Poland derive from the name of the West Slavic tribe of Polans (Polanie), while in some languages the exonyms for Poland to derive from the name of another tribe – the Lendians (Lędzianie).
Portus Cale was an ancient town and port in present-day northern Portugal, in the area of today's Porto and Vila Nova de Gaia. The name of the town eventually influenced the name of the subsequent country of Portugal, from the 9th century onwards.
The name of Greece differs in Greek compared with the names used for the country in other languages and cultures, just like the names of the Greeks. The ancient and modern name of the country is Hellas or Hellada (Greek: Ελλάς, Ελλάδα; in polytonic: Ἑλλάς, Ἑλλάδα), and its official name is the Hellenic Republic, Helliniki Dimokratia. In English, however, the country is usually called Greece, which comes from the Latin Graecia.
Originally, the name Rus' referred to the people, regions, and medieval principalities within the territory of the Kievan Rus'. Today its territory is distributed among Belarus, Ukraine, Eastern Poland, and the European section of Russia. The term Россия (Rossiya), comes from the Byzantine Greek designation of the Rus', Ρωσσία Rossía—related to both Modern Greek: Ρως, romanized: Ros, lit. 'Rus'', and Ρωσία.
The Slavic ethnonym, Slavs, is reconstructed in Proto-Slavic as *Slověninъ, plural Slověně. The earliest written references to the Slav ethnonym are in other languages.
Constructs such as ibid. , loc. cit. and idem are discouraged by Wikipedia's style guide for footnotes, as they are easily broken. Please improve this article by replacing them with named references ( quick guide ), or an abbreviated title. (April 2017) |
Historians believe that Bengal, the area comprising present-day Bangladesh and the Indian state of West Bengal, was settled in about 1000 B.C. by Dravidian-speaking peoples who were later known as the Bang. Their homeland bore various titles that reflected earlier tribal names, such as Vanga, Banga, Bangala, Bangal, and Bengal.
In C1020 ... launched Rajendra's great northern escapade ... peoples he defeated have been tentatively identified ... 'Vangala-desa where the rain water never stopped' sounds like a fair description of Bengal in the monsoon.
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: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)The region was then known to its native population as Tchili, a Native American word meaning "snow."
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: CS1 maint: bot: original URL status unknown (link) 31 October 2009.Chile's name comes from an Indian word, Tchili, meaning "the deepest point of the Earth."
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: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)The spring was an extremely cold one. Floki climbed a certain high mountain, and north across the mountain range he could see a fjord full of drift ice. That's why they called the country Iceland, and so it's been called ever since.
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: CS1 maint: postscript (link)In the Ewe language the name Togo means "Behind the Sea," and it was extended to the whole country by the Germans, owing to the fact that Dr. Nachtigal's first treaty in 1884 was made with the Chief of Togo.
... Greek term Tourkoi first used for the Khazars in 568 AD. In addition in "De Administrando Imperio" Hungarians call Tourkoi too once known as Sabiroi ...