Another First For The Expanded Panama Canal -- Making Panama Great Again! -- April 20, 2018

This has always been a burr under my saddle. I always thought the NY TImes article was a bit racist, suggesting the Panamanians attempt to widen the canal would go awry. The original post and updates are at this link.

Today, from Bloomberg: a first for the Panama Canal -- three LNG tankers crossed in one day. Wow.

Three liquefied natural gas tankers sailed through the Panama Canal on the same day this week, marking a first for the newly expanded waterway and highlighting the booming global gas trade.

All three ships -- Gaslog Hong Kong, Gaslog Gibraltar and Clean Ocean -- entered the canal on a staggered basis from the Pacific side Tuesday and had completed their crossings by early Wednesday, according to vessel tracking data compiled by Bloomberg. A representative for the canal authority confirmed the tanker moves.

The crossings underscore how the LNG trade has surged worldwide as new export facilities from the U.S. to Australia rumble to life and buyers in Asia boost their demand for the fuel. Since the canal completed a $5 billion expansion almost two years ago, traders and terminal developers have been closely watching the authority's ability to accommodate the jump in tanker traffic.

And more:

Dominion Energy Inc.'s Cove Point LNG terminal -- the second to send U.S. shale gas overseas -- started commercial service this week, roughly two years after Cheniere Energy Inc. opened up its Sabine Pass terminal in Louisiana. Thus far, Sabine Pass has shipped more than 300 cargoes to 26 countries.

As of March, the Panama Canal has seen 134 LNG vessels pass through it this fiscal year, according to a statement. Though this marks the first time three ships made the transit in one day, two ships have made the journey in 24 hours more than a dozen times.

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Exonyms and Endonyms

From wiki:

An exonym or xenonym is an external name for a geographical place, or a group of people, an individual person, or a language or dialect. It is a common name used only outside the place, group, or linguistic community in question.

An endonym or autonym is an internal name for a geographical place, or a group of people, or a language or dialect. It is a common name used only inside the place, group, or linguistic community in question; it is their name for themselves, their homeland, or their language.

For instance, "Germany" is the English language exonym, "Allemagne" is the French language exonym, and "Deutschland" is the endonym for the same country in Europe.

Japan is an exonym. The Japanese names (endonyms) for Japan are Nippon and Nihon.

And now the dots start to connect:

Before modern styles of romanization, the Portuguese devised their own. In it, /zi/ is written as either ii or ji. 

In modern Hepburn style, iippon would be rendered as Jippon. 

There are no historical phonological changes to take into account here. Etymologically, Jippon is similar to Nippon in that it is an alternative reading of 日本. The initial character 日 may also be read as /ziti/ or /zitu/.

Compounded with /hoɴ/ (本), this regularly becomes Jippon. Unlike the Nihon/Nippon doublet, there is no evidence for a *Jihon.

Wow. There you have it. It appears the Portuguese, before the "modern styles of romanization," provided the direct link to the exonym: Japan.

One can stop here, but wiki continues:

As mentioned above, the English word Japan has a circuitous derivation; but linguists believe it derives in part from the Portuguese recording of the early Mandarin Chinese or Wu Chinese word for Japan: Cipan (日本), which is rendered in pinyin as Rìběn (IPA: ʐʅ˥˩pən˨˩˦), and literally translates to "sun origin". Guó (IPA: kuo˨˦) is Chinese for "realm" or "kingdom", so it could alternatively be rendered as Cipan-guo. 

The word was likely introduced to Portuguese through the Malay Jipang. Cipangu was first mentioned in Europe in the accounts of Marco Polo. It appears for the first time on a European map with the Fra Mauro map in 1457, although it appears much earlier on Chinese and Korean maps such as the Gangnido. Following the accounts of Marco Polo, Cipangu was thought to be fabulously rich in silver and gold, which in Medieval times was largely correct, owing to the volcanism of the islands and the possibility to access precious ores without resorting to (unavailable) deep-mining technologies. 

The Dutch name, Japan, may be derived from the southern Chinese pronunciation of 日本, Yatbun or Yatpun. The Dutch J is generally pronounced Y, hence Ja-Pan.