toast-potent:

captainsnoop:

i’ll never understand why we don’t call countries the names they actually call themselves 

like, i know this is a weeaboo-sounding example, but let’s start with Japan. They call themselves Nippon or Nihon depending on… i guess, the speaker’s accent??? or their level of formality while speaking??? I dunno. But we still called them Zipangu for like a few hundred years. And now we call them Japan. 

All because Marco Polo asked someone in China about that island over there and they said “oh that’s Cipangu” and Marco Polo was like “Oh, Zipangu, cool.” And then he went back to Italy and said “Y’ALL THERE’S THIS DOPE-ASS ISLAND CALLED ZIPANGU” and people back in Italy were like “An island called Giappone? Dope.” 

And this pattern of people mishearing people kept repeating until we got to “Japan.” 

And we still call them Japan even though we know better. Because fuck you, Marco Polo asked the wrong person 500 years ago and misheard them and we’re sticking to that, I guess. 

that was literally just the world’s worst game of telephone

We got Perú when a Spaniard asked for the name of the territory and a native person answered him with the name of the cacique who ruled that zone, that cacique was called “Birú” and with time we got Virú, Berú, Pirú and finally Perú.

The real name of the Inca empire was “Tahuantinsuyo” or “Tawaintin Suyu” in Quechua that meant “four regions (” Tawa" = a group of four, “Suyu” = region, area or province)