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In his current review column, Card praises the movie Beautiful Country, which involves a young Vietnamese man looking for his American father. Card did not mention the fact that "Beautiful Country" is the literal translation of the two Chinese characters which designate America. The Chinese word for "beautiful" was used NOT for its inherent meaning but simply because its pronunciation in Chinese was similar to the opening sounds in the name "America". This of course presents constant irony when the Chinese government denounces the Beautiful Country in its propaganda and press releases. By and large, since most of the Chinese who came to America never left, my guess is that they would affirm that the name is in fact descriptive.
In Japan, the same practice was used of assigning Chinese characters (which they borrowed for use in writing nouns and verb roots), but the Japanese pronunciations somewhat modified from Chinese roots led to assigning the word for "rice" (pronounced "may") to "Amerika" combined with the word for "country". While Japan also has a kind of "alphabet" where the name "Amerika" is spelled out, it also continues to refer to the USA with the two Chinese characters for "Rice Country." In fact, Japan does buy some rice from the US, but the predominant food import from the USA is soybeans!
One final note: China is officially referred to in US Government documents as "the People's Republic of China" or "PRC." However, a better translation of the official name of the country would be "the Republic of the Chinese Peoples." The term for "Chinese" referring to peoples is the same as the words used for Chinese cuisine. The difference between the State Department and intended meaning of the name of the country is significant, because there are large overseas populations of Chinese ethnicity, not only in other Asian countries (like Singapore and Malysia), but also in the US, Canada, and the UK. The name given by the Communists is a deliberate appeal to these overseas Chinese to think of the government in Beijing as their government, by descent.
Posts: 8 | Registered: Feb 2002
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