Why do we call Deutschland Germany? (2020)
oktoberfesthaus.com
oktoberfesthaus.com
It turns out xenonym is a synonym of exonym.
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.
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.
Netherlands = 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=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)
And actually France seems to be derived from the same word in all languages I can think of: France, Frankreich, Frankrike, Ranska, Franca.
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".