> Cluster headache

> “Time to try trepanning myself”

It was Voltaire: “The HRE is neither Holy, nor Roman, nor an Empire”

Nonetheless, there are examples of other languages besides English messing up the name of another country. Practically no two languages call Germany or The Netherlands the same thing, and almost none call them what they call themselves. I’m not making a value judgement about this phenomenon, just saying that it’s not unique to English.

For another example, Japan’s name comes from the Chinese word spelled with the same characters, but it’s pronounced completely differently in Chinese.

Zongo is probably how China would be transliterated in English,

Zh is a J sound. It would be more like Jong Go

It’s a thing in all languages, because not every language has all the sounds of every other language.

For example, in Chinese, Canada is Jianada, America is Meiguo, Brazil is Baxi, England is Yingguo.

My understanding is that Japan has a similar story as the European explorers who first made contact there were Portuguese and couldn’t pronounce Nippon correctly.

I’d ask for some of whatever you’re smoking that makes you say all of this in response to a map, but I need to be able to drive a car today and I don’t want a DUI.

All projections of a sphere onto a flat plane introduce distortion. But there are lots of different projections though.

See this relevant XKCD:

How is this a “Mercator-style projection”?

Also, people figured out the Earth was round long ago exactly because of these sorts of discrepancies. There just wasn’t a lot of value in being hyper accurate since the purpose of a map before the invention of ocean ships was just walking from one city to another along roads.

Seems like it’s very specifically chosen to preserve distances and reduce distortion along the longitude lines closest to China. Perhaps it is useful in that capacity but it introduces distortion for the entire rest of the world.

I guess it really puts the 中 in 中国 (中 means middle, 中国 means “middle country” and is the Chinese name of China)

Sometimes I hate how time is linear.

Canada’s plan is for the exact same amount of people to be driving, but just with lithium instead of gasoline. No change to our urban planning, transit infrastructure, or car dependency. We’re screwed.

I think Norway is the only orange one

Yeah it’s a population density map but the scale is flipped, and it’s also kinda a topological map

Relevant XKCD

It’s not all like that. Some just change to be able to do more business with their neighbours.

I particularly like China’s model where they just say fuck timezones and put the whole country on one single zone. Everyone is just aware that the sun rises at different times in different parts of the country.

If you flipped it upside down you’d have the orientation most common on medieval maps. In fact, the reason why we call it “orientation” (“orient” of course meaning “East”) is because you used to put a map upright by putting east on the top. This is because Jerusalem was seen as the rightful top of the map as it’s the city of God.

Post title says EU

Swiss isn’t EU

In Quebec I’ve seen “Ouaf Ouaf” before

Way of the road Bubs