Articles on Languages, Scripts and Country Names: Exonyms and Writing
Three longer articles explain what the reference tables show: why one country has many names, how languages count, and how the world’s writing systems differ.
The articles
Each article starts from examples in the tables and names its sources.
- Exonyms and endonyms: why countries have different names. Germany under six unrelated roots, Greece as Hellas, Graecia and Yunan, Japan as 日本, and states such as Eswatini, Czechia and Türkiye that asked for a new English name.
- How languages count. French quatre-vingts, Danish halvfems and the Basque scores, the Maya base twenty, the Pirahã experiments, and the digits 0 to 9 in ten scripts.
- Writing systems explained. Alphabet, abjad, abugida and Chinese characters, the 44 consonant letters of Thai, the year Hangul was presented, and the 2,136 jōyō kanji.
How the three topics connect
The three articles look at one question from three sides: how a language writes down what it borrows from another. A country name is a borrowing, and the article on exonyms follows Germany through six roots, from Old High German diutisc to the Slavic word for speechless, and Greece through Hellas, Graecia and the Persian Yauna. The same name can then be written in several scripts: Persian آلمان, Ukrainian Німеччина and Japanese ドイツ all stand in its table, each with a romanisation.
The writing systems article explains why those romanisations are needed and why they look so different. An abjad such as Arabic or Hebrew leaves most vowels unwritten, an abugida such as Devanagari or Thai attaches them to consonants, and Japanese mixes kanji with two syllabaries. The number article adds a third layer: even where the script is shared, the words for the same quantity are built differently, so French and Danish count some tens in twenties while Basque and Georgian do it more widely.
Each article is short on purpose and points to a table where the full material is kept. The examples in the text are taken from those tables, so a reader who wants the Danish word for seventy or the Thai name of the Thai language can check it there.
Where the data comes from
The articles draw on the tables of this reference. Country names in other languages, capitals and subdivisions are on the country pages, listed on the countries index. The language list gives the names of languages in their own scripts, the alphabet pages the letters of each script, and the numbers page one to ten in 314 languages.
Topic tables collect smaller sets of words across many languages: the days of the week, the months, the planets, the zodiac signs, the 88 constellations and the chess pieces. The articles link to them where an example comes from one of these lists.
Questions about the articles
Which article explains the word exonym?
The article on exonyms and endonyms: an exonym is the outside name of a place, such as Germany, and the endonym its own name, such as Deutschland.
Where are the numbers in other languages?
The numbers page lists one to ten in 314 languages and the digits of 23 numeral systems; the article on counting covers the systems built on twenty.
Why do the articles give romanisations?
Most examples are written in their own script, Arabic, Cyrillic, Devanagari, Chinese or Japanese, and a romanisation lets readers who do not read that script follow the comparison.
Are the articles sourced?
Yes. Each article lists its sources at the end, with the date they were checked.