I've heard that the term Pennsylvania Dutch actually comes from English-speakers mishearing/misunderstanding when the speakers refer to their own language "Deutsch".
Holland is a province of the Netherlands. Because it was the one most active in trade abroad people came to associate Dutch people with Holland.
“Dutch” however is some peculiar English thing. The Holland/Netherlands thing exist in manny countries but in my home country Norway we call them “nederlender” or “Hollender.” This is similar to what the Dutch call themselves.
Holland is a region within the Netherlands. It is (was?) the most populous and economically productive region, so over time got used as a substitute for Netherlands.
"Dutch" is derived from a word that means "the people". As is the Deutsch in Deutschland (what Germans call their nation - land of the people, basically). At one time, there were high Dutch and low Dutch, describing people from hilly regions in (what is now) Germany and people from the low-lying area that is now the Netherlands.
Netherlands is just what it sounds like - the low lands. Apt, since so much of the country should be underwater.
Not convinced. Those UK regions are clearly defined current regions and used equally wrong in most languages. In the Germany case they are extinct people and different languages have picked different ones to name the current country. I would be surprised if any language named GB after Scotland or Wales.
Holland: two provinces of The Netherlands. Dutch: the ethnicity. The word has the same origin as "Deutsch". The Netherlands: the european part of the Kingdom of the Netherlands.
I think @alistairSH and @socialdemocrat stated it best!
Also, I am an American and I used to work for a Dutch company (though i was based/worked out of the U.S. side)...and i will add that as many Dutch friends as i have, they all still dislike being wholesale referred to as "Hollanders" or living in the "country" of Holland. ...Which, i can not blame them for disliking of course. ;-) Also, when i speak English i refer to them as my *Dutch* buddies, but if i'm speaking in one of the Dutch dialects, then definitely use "Nederlanders". :-)
(Michael Troughton playing the naive politician making an ultimatum to then-queen Beatrix of the Netherlands over the phone, and of course the brilliant Rik Mayall)
What a disappointing article. All it answers is where the name Germany comes from and what it means (men of the forest or neighbors) and briefly touches on Alemania (without explaining its etymology), but has nothing to say about the origin or etymology of Tyskland, Niemcy, or Deutschland. Why even bother writing an article if you are just going to half-ass it?
Amen. However people are always going to try and game systems so that they can get in a better position than their competitors. I see no way out sadly.
Well, exo- means “outside” and xeno- means “foreign/alien”, so they both convey the same meaning. In any case, exo- is the opposite of endo- (inside) and auto- (self) could be perceived as the opposite of xeno-, so I would pair the antonyms as: endonym/exonym and autonym/xenonym.
>but has nothing to say about the origin or etymology of Tyskland, Niemcy
The Polish word Niemcy is peculiar: the word "Slavs" literally means "word people" while "Germans" literally means "mute/unintelligable people". I.e. the word originally meant something like "anyone we don't understand" (similar to the Greek word "barbarian" - someone who says bar-bar, some gibberish). Apparently, at some point the most common type of an unintelligable person you'd meet was someone from a Germanic tribe, so the word began to mean "Germanic". A few centuries ago the word still meant "Germanic" in Russian, people used it to refer to the Dutch and Swedes as well. I can guess Germans have been the most common type of a Germanic person in the last few centuries so the word's meaning was narrowed again and now exclusively means "German".
Tyskland and Deutschland stem from the same root teud- "people, folk", so it's literally "land of the people". Interestingly, the word was borrowed into Slavic and now means "foreigner, stranger" (Russian "chuzhoy", Czech "cizinec"). In Russian a derivation "chush" also means "gibberish" (we've come a full circle).
Same in south slavic languages... "nemci" can be almost literally translated to "mute people", and the country is called "nemačka", "njemačka" or "nemčija", all from the same root - "nem" = "mute"
And to add, in some south-slavic languages, German people are also sometimes colloquially called "švabe", based on the region of Germany called Swabia. This is a bit silly, like saying "Texans" for anyone from United States.
That’s what I thought too until I learnt that a sizeable group of German speaking people calling them selves just that lived in Serbia for centuries before being expelled after WW2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Germans_of_Serbia
There's an academic field called historical linguistics, with a subfield called Slavistics. It's a solid scientific theory which is based on historical data and typology. I may have gotten some details wrong, but it's generally how the sound changes occured according to mainstream academia.
Feli from Germany actually covers this topic well, in her YouTube post at https://youtu.be/1Gyhu03qHTo -- as you would expect from someone who is German by birth, but speaks English very fluently and has lived in the US for years.
Both the name of the tribe and the ethnonym derive from the same PIE and proto Germanic root meaning something like "the people". They are closer to each other etymologically than any other words for "German".
Which is quite a different thing than what you said before. Just like one day I might be genetically closer to my brother than anyone else alive in the world, but he still wouldn't be my father.
I don't disagree with that - my wording was sloppy - but also consider that words aren't like genes. Horizontal phonetic transfer and phonetic reevaluation via processes like folk etymology are pervasive today and were also in the ancient past.
> While morphologically similar, the Latin root Teutonic for "Germanic" is more distantly related, and originally a name of a Celtic or Germanic tribe that inhabited coastal Germany. It came probably via Celtic from Proto-Germanic þeudanaz ("ruler", "leader of the people"), from þeudō ("people, tribe"), from Proto-Indo-European *tewtéh₂ ("people", "tribe").
No, Deutsch is related to the word Teuton through a common ancestor, but does not descend from it.
In the Middle Ages, the word "tiudisc" (later Deutsch and Dutch) was used to refer to the "common people" and their vernacular language, as opposed to clergy and Latin. "German language" is etymologically "language of the common people".
More broadly, what we call Germany (or India, or China, or Italy) today are recent fictions created from very places that were ethnically diverse, and whose constituent populations would have identified more by their tribe than by their "country". The variations in terminology is the vestige of that past.
> More broadly, what we call Germany (or India, or China, or Italy) today are recent fictions
I don't know about your other examples but the etymologic root of India is millinea old.
> that were ethnically diverse, and whose constituent populations would have identified more by their tribe than by their "country".
India was not politically united but ancient works like the Arthashastra make a distinction between Indian and foreign despite the diversity within India.
Greek city states frequently waged wars against each other but the Hellenes still saw themselves as distinct from barbarians.
If anything is a recent invention, it's the idea of a country as a nation state.
> If anything is a recent invention, it's the idea of a country as a nation state.
When we use the bare word "India" in the English language today, it refers to the modern country as a nation state, and not to its etymological origin as the Hellenized Persian word for the peoples and lands to the southeast of the Sindhu (Indus) river. The great empires of subcontinental history wouldn't have called themselves India, but rather used their own names like "Magadha" or "Chola".
Even the standard name for modern India used in much of the northern part of the country, "Bharat" is itself a reference to a ancient tribe of the Gangetic plain region, and not something that historically reflected the subcontinent as a whole, much like the situation with names used for Germany.
When we refer to the subcontinent in other time periods, (i.e. the time of the Arthashastra), we qualify it with that time period, like , "Prehistoric India", "Vedic India", "Classical India" "Medieval India", etc. That's nothing specific to India either, we do that for all parts of the world.
> For one thing, languages are inherently inconsistent, so perhaps the better question is, why not?
Exactly.
My point was simply that we call them "Tedeschi" in Italy because it come from an ancient latin word that means "people" or "peasant" and it came to latin from a German word that meant "shepard" (or sth like that)
But the land has always been called Germany.
We use different names for different things and that's OK.
The name "Italian" was referred to a small area in the south of Italy millennia ago and then became synonim for the entire peninsula.
Names often have no real meaning, but how they came to be can sometimes be interesting.
Fun, probably not fact, but at least rumour: the general Slavic term for Germans, nemez/niemec is related to the term for a mute person (that part is true, look it up), and that's because the Slavic tribes assumed that what the Germanic tribes they had interactions with were speaking wasn't an actual language, or at least unintelligible.
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[ 1.00 ms ] story [ 112 ms ] threadNetherlands = Nederlande = "low lands", encompasses the land which is devoid of mountains
Dutch = same origin as Deutsch (like Pennsylvania Dutch, which is closer to German than Dutch)
“Dutch” however is some peculiar English thing. The Holland/Netherlands thing exist in manny countries but in my home country Norway we call them “nederlender” or “Hollender.” This is similar to what the Dutch call themselves.
"Dutch" is derived from a word that means "the people". As is the Deutsch in Deutschland (what Germans call their nation - land of the people, basically). At one time, there were high Dutch and low Dutch, describing people from hilly regions in (what is now) Germany and people from the low-lying area that is now the Netherlands.
Netherlands is just what it sounds like - the low lands. Apt, since so much of the country should be underwater.
> "When people say England, they sometimes mean Great Britain, sometimes the United Kingdom, sometimes the British Isles - but never England"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eE_IUPInEuc
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A5sC6j8gH_4
(Michael Troughton playing the naive politician making an ultimatum to then-queen Beatrix of the Netherlands over the phone, and of course the brilliant Rik Mayall)
It turns out xenonym is a synonym of exonym.
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/xenonym
The Polish word Niemcy is peculiar: the word "Slavs" literally means "word people" while "Germans" literally means "mute/unintelligable people". I.e. the word originally meant something like "anyone we don't understand" (similar to the Greek word "barbarian" - someone who says bar-bar, some gibberish). Apparently, at some point the most common type of an unintelligable person you'd meet was someone from a Germanic tribe, so the word began to mean "Germanic". A few centuries ago the word still meant "Germanic" in Russian, people used it to refer to the Dutch and Swedes as well. I can guess Germans have been the most common type of a Germanic person in the last few centuries so the word's meaning was narrowed again and now exclusively means "German".
Tyskland and Deutschland stem from the same root teud- "people, folk", so it's literally "land of the people". Interestingly, the word was borrowed into Slavic and now means "foreigner, stranger" (Russian "chuzhoy", Czech "cizinec"). In Russian a derivation "chush" also means "gibberish" (we've come a full circle).
Btw. most of the Slavs are in for big surprise where comes English word "slave" from.
1) teud- => t'ud'-, i.e. the diphong -eu- changed to -u- and palatalized -t-
2) t'ud'- => c'üdz'-, another round of palatalization, similar to how Latin -tio came to be pronounced as -tsio (Polish still has "cudzy")
3) c'üdz' => ci(d)z- , sound change ü => i is quite common across languages, for example Greek -y- => -i-
As for the meaning, the Proto-Slavic word first meant "(foreign) people" => Czech "foreigner", Russian "stranger"
This page has some references at the bottom:
https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Slavic...
This was the old Slavic distinction between people who they could understand, and people who they couldn't.
https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/deutsch#German
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theodiscus
> While morphologically similar, the Latin root Teutonic for "Germanic" is more distantly related, and originally a name of a Celtic or Germanic tribe that inhabited coastal Germany. It came probably via Celtic from Proto-Germanic þeudanaz ("ruler", "leader of the people"), from þeudō ("people, tribe"), from Proto-Indo-European *tewtéh₂ ("people", "tribe").
In the Middle Ages, the word "tiudisc" (later Deutsch and Dutch) was used to refer to the "common people" and their vernacular language, as opposed to clergy and Latin. "German language" is etymologically "language of the common people".
More specifically, Julius Caesar popularized the use of "Germania" for lands north of the Rhine.
And Tedeschi is probably from Latin "theodiscus", itself distantly probably related to Deutsch:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theodiscus
More broadly, what we call Germany (or India, or China, or Italy) today are recent fictions created from very places that were ethnically diverse, and whose constituent populations would have identified more by their tribe than by their "country". The variations in terminology is the vestige of that past.
I don't know about your other examples but the etymologic root of India is millinea old.
> that were ethnically diverse, and whose constituent populations would have identified more by their tribe than by their "country".
India was not politically united but ancient works like the Arthashastra make a distinction between Indian and foreign despite the diversity within India.
Greek city states frequently waged wars against each other but the Hellenes still saw themselves as distinct from barbarians.
If anything is a recent invention, it's the idea of a country as a nation state.
When we use the bare word "India" in the English language today, it refers to the modern country as a nation state, and not to its etymological origin as the Hellenized Persian word for the peoples and lands to the southeast of the Sindhu (Indus) river. The great empires of subcontinental history wouldn't have called themselves India, but rather used their own names like "Magadha" or "Chola".
Even the standard name for modern India used in much of the northern part of the country, "Bharat" is itself a reference to a ancient tribe of the Gangetic plain region, and not something that historically reflected the subcontinent as a whole, much like the situation with names used for Germany.
When we refer to the subcontinent in other time periods, (i.e. the time of the Arthashastra), we qualify it with that time period, like , "Prehistoric India", "Vedic India", "Classical India" "Medieval India", etc. That's nothing specific to India either, we do that for all parts of the world.
Exactly.
My point was simply that we call them "Tedeschi" in Italy because it come from an ancient latin word that means "people" or "peasant" and it came to latin from a German word that meant "shepard" (or sth like that)
But the land has always been called Germany.
We use different names for different things and that's OK.
The name "Italian" was referred to a small area in the south of Italy millennia ago and then became synonim for the entire peninsula.
Names often have no real meaning, but how they came to be can sometimes be interesting.
And actually France seems to be derived from the same word in all languages I can think of: France, Frankreich, Frankrike, Ranska, Franca.