[borismus]

Agree with sentiment but want to nitpick a bit. It’s unclear that the Roman Empire collapsed at all. Many Roman institutions lived on well past the 5th century and were assimilated into gothic Frankish Visigoth etc societies.

[bookofsand]

Rome collapsed. Population crashed in the V century from 1M to under 100k. Roman institutions survived in Constantinopole for another thousand years, until XV century when that city population collapsed under Ottoman pressure

https://davidgalbraith.org/trivia/graph-of-the-population-of...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Istanbul

[ithkuil]

I assume that various Chinese capitals went through similar population crashes. It's true though that Roman civilization had a particular emphasis on the name of The City, but that didn't prevent the Greek speaking citizens of the estern Roman empire to call themselves Ῥωμαῖοι.

The etymology of Zhongguo IIRC is "central city". Was this the actual name of an actual city that then became the name for the concept of a central city/state as dynasties and rules changed? Is it analogous as if the word Roma had become a generic term for state in european languages and now you'd just call the United Romas of America?

[_hao]

> The etymology of Zhongguo IIRC is "central city". Was this the actual name of an actual city that then became the name for the concept of a central city/state as dynasties and rules changed?

中国 (Zhōngguó) is middle country/state/nation, not city.

[HKH2]

'Zhongguo' means 'middle kingdom'.

I don't think Chinese is that flexible. The only thing I can think of is Chengdu (which is not really related): https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chengdu#Name