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It may be true that many the Chinese names for those lands are the same, or at least very similar, to those used in Ricci's maps; but, suppose you could remove
by hmwhy 7y ago
It may be true that many the Chinese names for those lands are the same, or at least very similar, to those used in Ricci's maps; but, suppose you could remove all existing knowledge about what those lands are called in the Chinese language and ask well-educated Chinese speakers to name them base on their Italian (or whatever more appropriate) names, I think people will still come up with very similar names.
The reason is because many foreign words are translated according to how they sound, so phonetic (?) requirements already substantially limit the possible choice of characters.
Since most (every?) character in Chinese has a meaning, I think people generally prefer choosing characters that have neutral to positive meanings, characters that can be put together to form a word or phrase, and/or those that have meanings associated with the actual word being translated.
I think historically there are also "preferred characters" (maybe there is even an unofficial guideline for writers/translators?) when it comes to translating foreign words into Chinese, for example 巴 (bā) is often used for sounds like "ba" or "pa". Some examples of this are the one you have given for Europe (although I think it was likely the "pa" in Europa instead of Europe); Paris (巴黎); and bus (巴士). The same, I think, can be said for most of the characters in the examples you have given.
Perhaps a somewhat related observation is the "divergence" between dialects, where things just don't sound quite right or completely different had they been translated with the same characters. Examples for this would be chocolate (朱古力 in Cantonese and 巧克力 in Mandarin); salad (沙律 in Cantonese and 沙拉 in Mandarin); and very often names for places and people.
- dwohnitmok 7y agoSure, there's some bound to the list of characters reasonable to choose, but Ricci's choice has cemented certain old-fashioned choices which are no longer updated (see e.g. 细). 欧罗巴 indeed is from Europa, but it has persisted as the full name of Europe in Chinese (欧罗巴洲) as opposed to its usual abbreviated form (欧洲). Indeed there is a series of official handbooks published by Xinhua for a variety of languages dictating how the phonemes in those languages should be transliterated into Chinese. Ricci's translations do not follow these. Having approximately 400 years of priority lets you do that. The handbooks also generally defer to well-established, preexisting names and conventions where they exist. Also to answer one of your questions, no not all characters in Chinese have meaning. The more well-known case is purely phonetic characters, although it is quite tricky to find ones that have absolutely no other attested meaning. One example of this is 噶. The less well-known case (I don't know whether the phenomenon even has a standard English term) is of indivisible or "continuous" polysyllabic words, although these words are not always obscure. These are the exceptions to the rule that a Chinese character is a morpheme. Here the constituent characters of the word have no meaning individually and exist only in the context of this word. They are not reusable linguistic units outside of that word. Some, but not all, of these later evolved to have independent meaning to fit in with other Chinese characters.
- hmwhy 7y agoMy previous comment was a mental experiment for something that I found super interesting; it just kind of leaked out without much, um, thinking. It was definitely not my intention to suggest that Ricci's choice did not influence what is in the language today, not least because this is all new to me (the wrong choice of "historically" probably made things worse). In any case, thank you very much for taking the time to explain, particularly the part about characters with no meanings! Edit: typo!