this post was submitted on 29 Jul 2024
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It's annoying when English names of countries are significantly different than what the countries call themselves. Besides China = Zhongguo, off the top of my head there's Japan = Nippon and Germany = Deutschland.
i mean everyone has a different name for germany though: france says allemagne after the tribe that was closest to them, the romans said germania after the tribe that was closest to them (and that's where english gets it from), poland says "niemcy" because they considered german to be utter nonsense speech, and german-speaking countries say some variation on "deutschland" meaning land of the people.
exonyms and endonyms are a part of all languages, it just depends on when and how a language started caring about said country/city. Hence why you generally only have exonyms for the largest cities of countries, that's what anyone outside the country cares about.
It's a thing in all languages, because not every language has all the sounds of every other language.
For example, in Chinese, Canada is Jianada, America is Meiguo, Brazil is Baxi, England is Yingguo.
My understanding is that Japan has a similar story as the European explorers who first made contact there were Portuguese and couldn't pronounce Nippon correctly.