Why is Jordan (the country) spelt ヨルダン? I recently found out that Jordan (the country) is spelt , not , which is how it's spelt in a person's name. Is this based on how it's pronounced in Arabic and/or Hebrew, or how it's pronounced in a European language other than English?

Wikipedia says that Jordan was indeed () until 2003, when the Ministry of Foreign Affairs changed it to ().

Jordan is not pronounced in either Hebrew or Arabic (see Wikipedia for a romanization), but in Hebrew the J is [j] rather than a [dʒ]. Whether the change > occurred because J was known as [j] from Hebrew (via the Latin Bible: Iordanis "River Jordan" > , see Chocolate's comment below; also cf. "Jew"), from loanwords from Germanic languages (like Dutch, German, Scandinavian languages) or from all of those together is unclear. What seems to be clear, however, is that the Japanese regarded to be the more natural choice for the transcription of Jordan into , when the Ministry of Foreign Affairs decided to change to , together with 59 other country names and 88 place names. (See this archived newspost from the ). The people of Japan had apparently been complaining that the Ministry of Foreign Affairs was spelling country and place names differently from everybody else.