Country Names and Origins: Etymology and Typonomy

What is America? Is it this continent, or is it this country? Or is it this guy?

Toponymy is the science that studies the names of places, and it divides country names into four categories.

The directly descriptive names.

These are the countries that take the name from the people who used to live there, or a feature of its ethnic group.

France took their name from the Franks tribe, Ghana got its name from an empire that used to be in that land in the 13th century; and the case of Papua New Guinea, “Papua” means frizzy-hiring and “Guinea,” comes from the Tuareg word “Aginaw,” that means black people.


Korea is called “Daehan” in Korean, and it means “Big Han,” from the Han tribes that established there in the 2nd Century BC.

Vietnam took this name for the Bach Viet tribe, that lived in the southeast China. Italy for the Vitali Tribe, and Switzerland by the Schwyz people.

The second group is the country names taken from some aspect of its land.

In the southwest of Montenegro there is a mountain with a dark gray color, and if your Spanish is good enough, you know that “Monte” means mountain and “Negro,” black.


Sierra Leone got its name for the roaring sounds heard by Portuguese colonizers in the mountains... they sound like lion roars, but in fact, that were thunders.

Iceland is a funny story- the Icelandic people didn’t want any visitors, so they decided to name the island in that way to deter visitors to stop going there.

The third group is the countries named after its location.

Japan, means “Land of the Rising Sun,” and as they are in the east of China, and the sun rises from the east.

Same with the country Timor-Leste, Timor comes from “timur,” "East" in Malay, and Leste means "East" in Portuguese… so they could be called “East-East.”

10. Australia comes from “Australis,” that means southern in Latin, a short name of how the Greeks called the lands on this side of the world.

South Africa was clever, their address is embedded in their name.
-Hi dude, what’s your name?
-South Africa
-But where are you?
-South Africa
-...

The fourth and final group is the ones who take their names from a person.

...like the Philippines. named after Spain’s King Philip II.

The “America” part of the United States of America name is thanks to this guy- who figured that Christopher Colombus had found a new continent instead of landing in India as he thought. Some people didn’t get the memo and still call these guys ‘Indians’.

Colombia, as you probably figured, is named in honor of Colombus.

Barbados means (“Bearded Ones”), Colombus named that island after looking the banyan trees that you can find there.

Other countries were named directly by Columbus, like St. Lucia. This is the only country named after a female name, it was the thanks to St. Lucia of Syracuse, a Christian martyr.

Bolivia was named after their national hero, Simon Bolivar. The Solomon Islands after the biblical king. And if you thought Turkey was named after the bird, well you’d be wrong, the name was taken after the ethnic group that used to be there.

There is a bonus group, the rest, names that don’t fit into any group,

Like Comoros, comes from the Arabic “al Qamar,” and means moon, and talking about the moon, Mexico, who is a simplification of Metztlixihtlico (yeah say México is easier), that means “In the navel of the moon.”

14. The Bhutanese people call their country Druk Yul, that means “land of a thunder dragon”... badass, right?.

Errata, we highlighted Kirguistan instead Bhutan

Do you want something relaxing? Nauru, an island in the Pacific, was named after an indigenous word “anáoero,” and it means “I go to the beach.”

Another curious case is the Netherlands, aka Holland. That’s just the name of two provinces in the country.

The Holland area was very wealthy and had a lot of influence on the XIX Century over the rest of the country. Thanks to that influence, people began to understand the Holland province as a referential point and took it as a country name.

In this part of the video, we would say the name of our sponsor, but we don’t have one, so make all those things that help us to grow.

_________________________
Here at Explainosphere, we like explaining things. As curious and eccentric as they may seem, we believe there is always someone, somewhere, trying to figure out how things work.

If we answered your question on how the Internet works, please leave us a message in the comments.

Check more at explainoshpere.com