It's not from Germany, it's named after a guy named Samuel German
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_chocolate_cake
... just like a French drain is named after Henry Flagg French
FARINE
FIVE ROSES
FLOUR
When Bill 101 passed, they had to remove “flour” from the sign as it was an English word. However, they were allowed to keep “Five Roses”, as opposed to “Cinq Roses”, since it’a a brand name, so now it simply reads:
FARINE
FIVE ROSES
[1] https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/farine-five-roses-sign
It's impressive/weird to me that the convention got all the countries to use the english word on the stop sign, for consistency.
Good. The purpose of a dictionary is to record how language is used, not to gatekeep or social engineer what is "proper" language and what isn't.
Linguistic prescriptivism is the purview of bigots and school teachers.
It comes in a few flavours. Sometimes an assumption that linguists as people are never prescriptive. Sometimes as an argument for the respectability of established dialect (not to say this conclusion is wrong, only the argument.)
There is plenty of (mostly non-professional IME) "normative descriptivism" floating around.
Alot is literal translation of English to French, not using a specific french term or word for an item.
Example I always hear of: sour cream is translated to Crème Sure in Canada french.
Where while not always identical in product, proper France French term is Crème fraîche
While sour cream may sometimes have additional stabilizers, the main difference (both are cultured cream products made with a similar process) is that crème fraiche has a significantly higher (~30%) than sour cream (~20%).
Before you ask, no, no one uses that.
https://blogs.mediapart.fr/robert-chaudenson/blog/210513/ema...
Ironically, the brain drain seems to only be going one way.
> Where while not always identical in product, proper France French term is Crème fraîche
Rarely identical.
When your tour passes by that neighborhood, your guide would surely tell you that it is actually named after the British general John French who was stationed there, and a similar mistake as the one above made it change nationality.
Everyone laughs, and continue with the tour. But those that would later search for general French woill find he didn't serve with his Majesty's forces in Palestine – and that the hill is named after the French monks from the Monastery of St Anne…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_fries
The funny thing is that this name certainly has nothing to do with France :
"The origin of the name French fries has nothing to do with France, the name comes from the Irish. In the old Irish language, the word french means chopped. At the beginning of the 20th century, Irish people immigrated to the United States, Canada, and other regions. These immigrants popularized the term french fries to other countries. Therefore, French fries originally meant frenched fries, cut into strips. Frenched strips are larger than julienned filaments, so this is why it is called French fries."
(from https://www.potatochipprocessing.com/why-are-french-fries-ca... )
See also "The French cut" a.k.a. "Julienning" :
FWIW thick cut fries are often sold as "Flamse Friets" (Flemish fries, in Dutch) or "Belgische Fritten" (Belgian fries, in German) so having "French fries" in English just felt consistently inconsistent.