ANSWERS: 1
  • You answered your own question. Different languages are different.
    • bostjan the adequate 🥉
      Different languages are usually not that different, though. Take the next country, alphabetically: Ghana. The name for that country across all known languages of the world is either "Ghana," "Gaana," "Gana," or "Kana." That's almost no variations, since "Ga," "Gaa," and "Gha" sound almost identical, and "Ka" is only used in languages that don't feature the "g" sound, and the "k" sound is the next closest. I'd say you'd have a good point if other names of countries varies this much from one language to another, but typically, they don't. That's because, usually, a nation decides what it wants to be called, and then other cultures try to honor that, but sometimes have trouble with a sound combination, so they make small adjustments. For example, if I were to come to the USA and tell immigration I was from "Slovenija," and they have trouble with the soft "j", they might mark it down as "Slovenia," which, indeed, is the English version of that same country. If I went to Spain, they'd tend to spell it "Eslovenia," just like "Espania" is their version of "Spain," the Spanish are more comfortable with words that start with "Es" than just "S". The biggest variation would come from Korea, where they would say I was from "Suellobania," in this scenario, because Korean is a very different language from Slovenian, phonomically. But that same explanation makes no sense when you go from Deutschland to Germany to Allemania to whatever, if I were in the same scenario, but from Germany.

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