To add insult to injury, what they call it, Deutschland, sounds like what we should call Netherlands
Likewise, Germans feel betrayed when they find out that you don’t call your country Deppendorf
But we are not a village
Deppenmetropole*
A metropolis in size can still be a village in spirit.
ITT: people learning about endonyms and exonyms.
i really wonder where you are from
Take it up with your ancestors (or the English, if you have no English ancestors yourself). They started calling the Dutch “Dutch” when people in what is today The Netherlands and Germany were both called deutsch/dutch, and the English didn’t care to adjust when the distinction started to matter.
But Germans are not much better, it’s absurd that Italian city names that aren’t at all hard to pronounce for Germans have different names in German, e.g. Torino, Milano, Roma (Turin, Mailand, Rom), and we also call Japan “Japan”, even though Japanese is one of the few languages that uses a word for Germany that is derived from “Deutschland” and “Nippon” isn’t hard to pronounce for Germans, either.
Also, the saxons never lived in the German federal state of Saxony.
Plus the true downgrade of Firenze to “Florence.”
Naples? Rome? Venice?
Those have more straightforward transliterations. But where the fuck does the L even come from?
Firenze was also the art and culture capitol of Europe for quite some time, so this isn’t some backwater town. It’s like the CCP telling people that New York is now officially called “Not Yoodle” in Chinese.
Florence comes from the Latin name of the city Florentia.
TIL
Napoli. Roma. Venezia.
Czech: Neapol, Řím, Benátky.
Do you perhaps mean “Florenz”?
No, in Italian, the city’s name is Firenze, which is much cooler IMO than nasal EN/DE Florence. Which, TIL, is from the Latin Florenti, as in “Florentine” as the ajdectival form.
What’s “Florenz”?
What’s “Florenz”?
It’s Firenze in German.
Florenz, but yeah
Having to learn new names for countries and cities is one of the worst parts of learning a second language.
lol it’s not by far
I speak two languages so yes, i’d say it really is. Some spanish place names are completely different than english ones and trying to dredge them up in conversation can be tedious if you don’t often use them.
But keep downvoting people you mildly disagree with. It really improves the platform and discussions. /s
Cool beans, I speak three languages and there’s no way you believe that some arbitrary vocabulary is harder than grammatical finesses, or some outrageous slang, or idioms/shibboleths.
Maybe you aren’t “speaking” that second language as well as you think?
Also, imagine caring about votes 😂 it’s not a disagree button, Brudi. But your high effort post probably deserves all the updoots.
“/s” 🤣 holy Moses, Reddit is leaking hard.
I’m glad accounts like yours out themselves so early after joining. Makes you easier to block.
Keep questioning peoples lived experiences. I’m sure you’ll make lots of friends that way. /s
I won’t be responding as i’ve blocked you.
Well Germans kind of were the Holy Roman Empire so in my books they can call those cities in italy what ever they fancy.
Those are good points but Torino as Turin is complicated, some folks there still call it that in dialect etc. and historically, run by the Lombards and all that.
English is terrible at this, Venice is Venezia, if you can say pizza you can say that.
“Venedig” in German, even though they literally use (almost) the same sound for z as Italian …
“Nippon” isn’t hard to pronounce for Germans, either.
I don’t know about that. Even if Germans are not shy of pronouncing letters wrongly (using V as F for instance), the P in Nippon makes no sense in German. It would have to be spelled with an H to make the right sound.
OK. German has an H (same as English, which makes it weird that it’s written with a P in the first place) and isn’t shy about spelling reforms, either.
Also, the saxons never lived in the area of the German federal state of Saxony.
(╯°□°）╯︵ ┻━┻
Guess what? The modern state of Saxony (aka Upper Saxony, Obersachsen) is not even contiguous with the state of Lower Saxony (Niedersachsen). They’re separated by nearly 300 km.
Although to be somewhat fair they are connected by Sachsen-Anhalt. And basically all of northern Germany was at one point called Saxony (“Old Saxony”, Altesachsen), at least by some others in the first millennium.
Of course history is funny; The lands of Upper Saxony weren’t part of the medieval Duchy of Saxony that followed, despite eventually taking the name (via “Electorate of Saxony” and then “Kingdom of Saxony”).
But anyway the “Anglo-Saxons” were probably really from Denmark and northern Schleswig-Holstein. The southern parts of their region might’ve been called Saxony at the time.
(I’m mostly posting this because I wanted to figure it all out)
IIRC Germany is named weirdly different around the world with names stemming from several roots.
Deutschland, Germany, Alemania, Nemezky, Saksa,…
But Germans are not much better, it’s absurd that Italian city names that aren’t at all hard to pronounce for Germans have different names in German, e.g. Torino, Milano, Roma (Turin, Mailand, Rom), …
Nobody is better. All languages do this to an extent. The Germanized city names especially in Northern Italy also stem from the fact that they used to be under Austrian control and they claim to speak German too.
All languages do this to an extent.
Exactly. In Spanish, we have some ‘curious’ names for Germany and its states and cities. «Alemania» is the name of the country. «Renania-Palatinado» is Rheinland-Pfalz, Bayern got turned into «Baviera». «Colonia» is Köln, «Friburgo de Brisgovia» is Freiburg im Brisgau…
Austrians are just as able as BRD Germans to pronounce something like Milano, though.
You are assuming that the name as it is in Italian today has always been the same and it isn’t. Both Milano and Mailand are linguistic descendants of the name whichever people who first set up shop there spoke and decided to call the place. And that wasn’t anywhere close to modern Italian. They are both valid.
English ditches the o and has Florence on the books as well. Geographical names follow no logical rule. Most are just historical accidents, some historical crimes. This is more in the former category if you ask me.
Cologne, Munich, Brussels, Naples, The Hague … It’s everywhere.
I say we should go the Belarus route.
I look forward to renaming virtually everything in the Americas.
It wouldn’t really make sense to use different names than the current locals, though.
Who decided that it wouldn’t make sense?
You’re entitled to your incredibly ridiculous opinion.
Just wait til’ you hear about what they call Japan in Japan.
ni!
Nihon-koku or Nippon-koku
There’s many such examples, just off the top of my head: Hungary, Finland, Greece, Georgia, Egypt and Japan.
Morocco (al-Maghrib “The West”), India (Bharat named after a legendary king), China (Zhōngguó 中国 “Middle Country”). There are probably several more…
I always thought that India uses both Bharat and India with English still an official language. Has the current government made the switch to only using Bharat?
India is the official name. I think Bharat or Hindustan is commonly used tho as folks speak in their local languages instead of English typically. I could be wrong. Worth noting that Hindustan would basically translate to “India” or Land of the Indus River.
They call pedo paradise america. Isn’t that crazy?
Hungary for some reason keeps surprising me. I know that fact, I just keep forgetting it.
As someone from Czech Republic, I am not surprised. There are sometimes huge differences between country names in czech and English. And the closer the country is, the bigger the difference.
For the German speaking countries eng - ger - cze:
Germany - Deutschland - Německo
Austria - Österreich - Rakousko
Switzerland - Sweiz - Švýcarsko
Other examples (eng - cze):
Czech - Česko
Slovakia - Slovensko
Slovenia - Slovinsko
Greece - Řecko
Georgia - Gruzie
Spain - Španělsko
Greenland - Grónsko
Hungary - Maďarsko
Croatia - Chorvatsko
Saksa in finnish. And Finland is Suomi in finnish.
Or Németország in Hungarian. And Hungary is Magyarország in Hungarian. Ország just means country, so they’re just “German country” and “Hungarian country”, literally.
Most slavic countries also call Germany Německo or the like.
This happens when there’s no fast global media when you meet a new nation, and you can’t copy someone else’s homework to come up with a name for them. Or when you copy someone else’s homework, instead of actually asking a member of that nation.
Nemetor sounds like a LOTR character
If you want LOTR character names, look up 🇮🇸 Icelandic names: there are
- over 4900 people by the name of Guðrún
- over 4400 — Sigurður
- over 4200 — Guðmundur
Some executioner style villain
The first time the inhabitants of what is now Germany and what is now Hungary met, there were no nations at all. People have been communicating and trading with those from far-off lands for longer than the concept of nation even existed, which is a major contributor to why these names are so different.
True, my bad for a poor word choice. I guess ‘people’ would have been more appropriate. But I guess the rest holds.
Apparently even Tacitus said it was a made up name. It seems like it might have originally applied to lands west of the Rhine, or some tribe living there in Roman times. So it might have applied to as much of modern Netherlands and Belgium as to modern Deutschland.
Don’t forget the ‘Heiliges Römisches Reich’ though - that always seemed a bit contrived.
Deutschland, sounds like what we should call Netherlands
Until you then find out that the Netherlands is actually called “Nederland” in the Netherlands. And the reason they’d called “Dutch” in America is due to an archaic mix-up between the two nationalities.
What do people from the Netherlands call themselves if not Dutch or the Dutch?
Like, people from the United States call themselves Americans, there’s the Spanish and French.
Are they called Netherlanders or something?
Well in Dutch they call themselves Nederlanders or Hollanders. Though Hollanders is technically only correct if they are from the Dutch province North-Holland or South-Holland
here is a CGP Grey video about the difference between Holland and the Netherlands https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eE_IUPInEuc
And the reason why the Netherlands is also known as Holland is basically before the unification of the Low Lands every province was a self governing state and Holland was the richest province. Hence why most traders who went abroad from the Low Lands were people from Holland. It’s therefore why people abroad would call the Low Lands Holland since Hollanders were the only people from the Low Lands they met and and after the Netherlands was formed the name Holland for that area stuck in many languages.
Holland is fairytale beautiful. Would happily live there. I loved visiting.
Most Dutch people I met just call it Holland. We do so in Denmark as well
“We” call it Holland because foreigners say “eh?” when we call it the Netherlands.
Hah, didn’t know that
Yeah wierd situation. Internally it only refers to the 2 provinces in the west but externally we all chant it during football matches
It’s not really a mix-up. More a continuation of an old name for the language spoken in the Netherlands. The Dutch centuries ago called their language Diets/Duuts/Duits which means something like Germanic. This was before the countries Germany and the Netherlands existed.
Diets is not a single language but a name for all the different regional languages spoken in the low lands. Diets is also known as Middle Dutch. The name was used to differentiate the languages from the Romance languages.
Hence why the English called the people of the low lands Dutch since the people of the low lands said they were speakers of Diets/Duuts/Duits.
Also in the Dutch national anthem there is a line that says “Ben ik van Duitsen bloed” “I am of Dutch/Deutsche blood” which does not refer to modern day Deutschland but to what all Germanic people in the low lands, what is now present day Netherlands, would call themselves back then.
The Dutch centuries ago called their language Diets/Duuts/Duits which means something like Germanic.
No, it means something like “people” or “of the people”.
Wait, so Dutch is the language of people and everyone else has been using animal languages this whole time!?
Ja
What’s Germany? You mean Německo?
You mean Niemcy?
No, he meant Allemagne
Clearly he meant Tyskland!
Americans are slowly learning about the rest of the world.
Better late than never.
America was originally just the name of South America, then the English lazily coined the term “North America”.
Entire nations: You cannot keep “America” for yourself. There is history, maps, books, the independence of other countries in the region called for the liberation of “America” (e.g. Simón Bolívar “the liberator of America”; “America for the Americans”; Sentimientos de la Nación: “America is free and independent of Spain and all other nations, governments, or monarchies”).
The U.S. of A.: Yeah… No. I’m America now. There’s no other “America” because there’s only North America and South America, 🤷🏼♂️ don’t you know? And the land is The Americas because it’s two in one. Duh. Erasure? I call it freedom! 🇺🇸🦅
The amazing thing is, people don’t refer to their home country by a two letter acronym.
(Sees car with CH sticker drive by…)
UK has entered the chat
In Denmark we refer to the UK as England. If it’s more official we call them Storbritannien but no one calls them that in everyday speech. It’s just England.
I know it’s not the point.
But spitting on Scotland and Northern Ireland like that is a bit harsh.
You have it backwards.
German in German is “Deutsch” or “Duits” in Dutch.
Dutch in Dutch is “Nederlands” or “Niederländisch” in German.
“Deutch” comes from an old high german word “diutisc” which meant “of the people”
“Dutch” comes from “Diest” meaning “people’s language”
When the Romans invaded England, they important the Latin “Germania” to refer to Germany and gradually started to use “Dutch” for the common people of the “lower countries” (Belgium and Netherlands)
Where does “Alemania” (what they call Germany in Spain) come from?
It comes from from french and originally from latin alamanus. There was a germanic tribe there called the the Alamanni.
AFAIK French has something similar. I might be wrong, but similarly to the Holland/Netherlands (Nederlanden) story, it was named after one of the tribes in Germany (alamanni, “all men”), before the great unification.
I think the term “The Nethetlands” was coined after the Reformation and Counter-Reformation when the northern provinces ,which became Lutheran, separated from the southern provinces which remained Roman Catholic.
The country was usually referred as “Holland” (a northern province) before then.
Uhh WTF? It is called Germany in Germany….
America brain
Deutchland is the German word for Germany. The land of the people….
Deutschland*
What about the Swamp Germans
