Well Hi, my first post here.
And this is actually my biggest question about this wonderful mod. The map names... and this quite answer my curiosity about them (at first i thought the map names would hinder the overall realism of this mod). I guess now that's all right.
Being a Chinese living in the largest Muslim country in the world (Indonesia, that's where Obama spent about a year or more of his childhood), i am pretty familiar with Chinese or Arabic names. But certainly names like Ramiel, Muttrah, Kyongan-Ni, Bi Ming, etc aren't familiar. At least some of them use the widely accepted Pinyin Romanized writing systems (like the ones EA used). However some are still in Cantonese (e.g. a CP called Choy Bridge in Bi Ming map). Some of them are even very South East Asian, "Tad Sae" sounds like Thai or Vietnamese to me.
Korea, Japan, and China all of them use kanji, but not every single word are similar in meaning to them. I used kanji (that is 'Chinese Traditional' (Hanzi) characters) notes to communicate with my Korean/Japanese friends in class when they can't speak the English fluently. Sure they understood, but with some little confusion. The Korean called it Hanja, Japanese Kanji, Chinese Hanzi. The Japanese Kanji is a bit modified, but similar in general with classic Chinese characters, Korean Hanja is the most ancient form and the original writing of classic Chinese characters (which is also different from its current depiction) and don't ask about the current simplified form used by PRC. In Indonesia they mostly taught the simplified ones.
Hanja writing of "Korea" (韓国
is read Hanguk in Korean, the characters are also read "Han Guo" in Chinese, which means Korea. The Japanese read "Kankoku" which also refers to Korea. Character 国 (Guk in KR), (Guo in CN), (Koku in JP) all means the same: country.
Romanized words are vary in Mandarin, the first is Wade-Gilles, which is not popular anymore, but still used in several places. They use a lot of double consonant alphabets to replicate the reading voice e.g. Tsing Ma (a real bridge in Hong Kong) or Tientsin (pinyin: Tianjin, China) or Hsiahou (pinyin: Xiahou, a name). They are used in Taiwan. The popular one is Pinyin, which is widely used and taught in many classes around the world.
If I understand it correctly, "Ni" means "two" in Japanese - does this apply to any dialect of Chinese? If so, Kyongan'Ni could translate to (Whatever) Two, which makes a lot more sense than "Rape You" for the name of a river, doesn't it?
Ni means "You" in Mandarin while Kyongan is not readable (not a Chinese Mandarin language, perhaps mean something else in certain Chinese dialects, other than being a Korean language). As in Chinese common greeting "Ni Hao!" (direct transliteration would be You Fine!) which equals to English "Hello!"
"Ni" means two in Japanese, Korean say "Du" for two, Chinese "Er".
