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Some countries whose endonyms are not like their English exonyms (lemmy.sdf.org)

submitted 8 months ago by lars@lemmy.sdf.org to c/map_enthusiasts@sopuli.xyz

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[–] MadBob@feddit.nl 10 points 8 months ago (1 children)

I'd say the Croatian endonym is close enough to the English exonym. Meanwhile the map's missing Albania (Shqipëri) and some edge cases: Wales (Cymru), Scotland (Alba), New Zealand (Aotearoa).

[–] OpenTTD@lemmy.zip 1 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

It might not be a mere country by a long shot but the one thing I find most interesting about Africa (IIRC) is that despite the linguistic variation and the number of nations being no less than any other continent has ever had, every precolonial culture in "Africa" referred to it as Alkebulan (I think that's the romanized pronunciation) with the possible (partial?) exception of Egypt.

That said, my memory about that feels sketchy. Can anyone confirm or dispute if Alkebulan is the actual name used by the local languages? Claiming I'm sure about this without actually checking feels disrespectful, but I no longer trust DuckDuckGo or Startpage because their use of Google's algorithm means NewPipe is censored from all search engines except Bing and Ecosia and search results have been uninspiring since ~2017 thanks to enshittification.

Hold on, checking Wikipedia...

Edit: No trace of the word itself on wp, but it did bring up the Akebu language when I searched it. Anyone know how much I was wrong? Or is this just survivorship bias due to me only knowing how to speak/read English?