Nikola Benin. Differences in pronunciation of the name China

Publication: Nikola Benin, PhD While Europe was largely unknown territory full of barbarian tribes, and the only civilisations were Mediterranean, China was steadily building a unified empire. It was also an empire with a wide variety of dialects and languages that, even today, show great variance. How these people referred to their new state at this time is unknown - probably they didn't at all yet - but the dynasty which forcibly reunited them after decades of warfare became known to outsiders. It seems to have been the name of this dynasty that was used to refer to the state itself - then and now. The dynasty was the Qin, and the name stuck as 'China'. (The Chinese themselves have a different name for their country, but that's another story...) Differences in pronunciation That name, however, is pronounced in some languages with a 'k', as in Hungarian (Kína), Finnish (Kiina), Croatian (Kina), or Romanian (China). In others, it uses a 'ch' sound - as in English 'cheese' - such as with English and Spanish (China), or Italian (Cina). German is a little strange in this regard, pronouncing it as 'keena', 'heena', 'sheena', or 'cheena'. So far there's nothing particularly unusual in all of this, since one of the most common sound changes is one that is referred to as palatalisation before the front vowels, such as 'k' > 'ch'. It could be supposed that some languages borrowed it from a language that conserved the velar 'k' sound before 'i', while in others it comes from another language that shifted it to 'ch'. But the truth is that something else happened here. First of all, the modern forms of the name are attested only from the sixteenth century and, as far as is known, there was no language prior to this in which 'China' was spelled with a 'k'. For example, in Old Greek it is Σῖναι, 'seenay', while the Late Latin form is Sīnæ, 'seenay', the source of the prefix sino- in words such as Sinology, the study of the history, language, and culture of China. In 221 BC the Qin controlled the entire former imperial territories of the north, plus the recently-incorporated Shu and Ba, but expansion beckoned to the north (a little, largely constrained by the construction of the Great Wall - shown here as a general border rather than specifying all of its different construction phases and locations) and to the south, where several campaigns between 221-209 BC greatly increased the empire (click on map to view full sized)