vonPeterhof wrote:Another one I noticed recently was the word for "ambassador" in certain languages. The East Asian CJKV languages use words that are written in the Chinese characters as 大使, with the combination of the characters most literally translated as "great envoy". Recently when applying for a Slovak visa I noticed that the Slovak word for "ambassador" was "veľvyslanec", which has the exact same literal meaning ("veľ[ký]" - great; "vyslanec" - envoy). Looking around Wikipedia and Wiktionary, I see that similarly structured words are used in a few other Slavic languages (Czech "velvyslanec", Slovene and Croatian "veleposlanik"), as well as several Uralic ones (Finnish "suurlähettiläs", Estonian "suursaadik", Hungarian "nagykövet") and a Turkic one (Turkish "büyükelçi").
Most of this is due to an ambassador's rank. Internationally, ambassadors are always the highest ranking in an embassy, the direct representative of their country's leader, thus in English the addition of the words "extraordinary and plenipotentiary." This is codified in the Congress of Vienna/Vienna Convention, upon which all diplomatic rules are based.