common recognizability of "Nippon" or "Nihon"

GodEmperorLeto said:

Plenty of literature recognizes the more accurate names of "Nippon" or "Nihon" for what most English-speakers call "Japan". Some authors never refer to it as "Japan" or it's people as "Japanese" (among them William Gibson and Neal Stephenson come to mind). Mostly it's "Nipponese" with those authors, but they are few, and most English writers call the nation "Japan."

From what I understand, we call if Japan because of the Mandarin Chinese pronunciation of the kanji. The Portuguese recorded the term from the Chinese as "Sipangu" or "Zipangu" if I remember correctly, and it made its way into English from there.

I, for one, would prefer to go around saying "Nippon" and "Nipponese", but most people would either not understand or take a moment to figure it out.

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So I'm supposing that these authors also refer to Spain as España, Germany as Deutchland, Greece as Ellas, and when they need a name for China, they type a long list of every romanized name for China from every Chinese dialect?

No, actually, they probably don't do that. And that makes them pretentious asses.

Glenn said:

...the southerners use Hanguk, as in Hanguk-saram (ﾅ?ﾃ佛｡ﾂ?ﾂ人(?), 한국사람, Korean people)...

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Found out that ﾂ人 is 인 (in),so ﾅ?ﾃ佛｡ﾂ?ﾂ人 would actually be 한국인 (Hangug-in). 한국사람 (Hanguk-saram), if written with hanja, would be a mixture: ﾅ?ﾃ佛｡ﾂ?사람. Also, the language can also be referred to as ﾅ?ﾃ佛｡ﾂ?말 (Hanguk-mal), which is less formal than ﾅ?ﾃ佛｡ﾂ?ﾅ津ｪ, and also as simply ﾅ｡ﾂ?ﾅ津ｪ, or 우리말 (urimal; lit. "our language).

This according to Wikipedia's page on Korean.

doinkies said:

From what I've heard, North Korea calls itself 窶卍ｩ窶朗...

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The Wikipedia article backs that up.

Sorry to dig up an old topic, but I promised an update...

I asked my professor whether or not there are dipthongs in Japanese, to which she replied that there certainly are, but it's much more complicated than just finding consecutive vowels. The main point seems to be where the syllable barrier falls; is すいか comprised of the す and いか, or すい and か? The position of the syllable barrier determines whether it's a dipthong or consecutive monopthongs.

Things like morphology also come into play in words like 青い; just looking at the sounds themselves in natural speech, one might even consider it a tripthong. Observing the morphology of the word, namely that the final い becomes other sounds when the adjective is conjugated, it is more commonly thought of as a dipthong あお followed by a monopthong い.

So in short; yes, there are dipthongs in Japanese, but it's more complicated than that.

//edit: granted, despite this new development, I might have repeated inaccurate information or misused the term before. I'll try to be more scrupulous in my research in the future.

I've known "Nippon" for as long as I can remember, I wasn't aware of "Nihon" til I started learning Japanese. I think that would be fairly typical where I'm from in New Zealand.

Thanks. We've been waiting six years to hear that.