[quote=“L_Mariachi, post:127, topic:82818, full:true”]
I see how one would be tempted to ascribe that to colonialist mindsets, but there’s nothing specifically Western about it. It’s pretty much universal. In almost all other languages Japan isn’t called “Nihon,” Germany isn’t called “Deutschland,” Russia isn’t called “Россия,” and so on.[/quote]
Germany is kind of a special case, since like the country the term is a recent one; other European countries just went with whichever Germanic tribe was most annoying to them.
As far as I can tell, non-Western countries do tend to be much better about place names. For example, the Japanese use doitsu for Germany (apparently learned from Dutch traders).
