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Learning Japanese (lemmy.world)
submitted 8 months ago by to c/lemmyshitpost@lemmy.world
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[–] 99 points 8 months ago (46 children)

The US still looking weird by calling Germany “Germany.”

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  • [–] 53 points 8 months ago (10 children)

    Tbf a good chunk of Europe calls it "land of people that can't speak" basically

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  • [–] 28 points 8 months ago (4 children)

    Cause they can't!1!

    But for real, for those who are curious: the border between Germany and Poland is effectively the border between western and eastern Europe. So to Slav people Germans lived right over there, and yet spoke something incomprehensible; so we called them "mute" (in Poland at least). If I can't understand you you are mute to me, basically. And the word for "Germans" is the same as for "Germany", so we call the country itself mutes 😅

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  • [–] 6 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

    For fun with words:

    • Niemcy - polish for Germans
    • Niemcy - polish for Germany
    • Niemy - polish for mute
    • Jadę do Niemiec - "I am riding to Germany"
    • Jadę z niemcami - "I am riding with germans"
    • Jadę z niemcem - "I am riding with a german"
    • Jadę z Niemczech - "I am riding from Germany"
    • Jadę z niemym - "I am riding with a mute"

    I wonder how confusing these are for people not speaking polish xD

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  • [–] 1 point 7 months ago (2 children)

    Literally it's more like "non-speakers", though, isn't it? Nie + mowić = Not + to speak.

    So, maybe in contemporary Polish the word has been polished to mean "mute", but could be that they were "those damn non-speakers [of our Polish] across that river-thing!"

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  • [–] 1 point 7 months ago (1 child)

    Well, the "mówić" part is not present, the root of the word is more similar to "niemy", meaning "mute"; the Polish word comes from "non-speaker", as in "not speaking at all". but that's just speculation on my part, I'm no linguist or etymologist 🤷‍♀️

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  • [–] 20 points 8 months ago (2 children)

    Nemecko
    Nemý

    Never realized that.

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  • [–] 22 points 8 months ago* (10 children)

    And what about the Romance languages. They call Germany “Land of the Alemanni”, they called an entire country full of different tribes after a single Germanic tribe that lived near the French/Italian border. It’s like calling the entire country of the Netherlands Amsterdam.

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  • [–] 13 points 8 months ago* (9 children)

    It's like calling the entire country of the Netherlands Holland. Holland(ia?) is part of the Netherlands which gave the name of the country in a bunch of languages.

    This is weird, by the way, I just wrote about the exact same thing not too long ago.

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  • [–] 6 points 8 months ago (8 children)

    I can open your link, but as someone who's Dutch, the way this all works in English is so absurd. Here we call Germany "Duitsland" and they speak "Duits". This is quite similar to what they say themselves, "Deutschland" and "Deutsch". We call our country "Nederland" and our language "Nederlands". This is again similar in German.

    Then why is English "Germany", "German" and "Holland"/"The Netherlands" and "Dutch". It's so silly. There are of course historic reasons, but can't we all just collectively change it?

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  • [–] 2 points 8 months ago (5 children)

    I think we can - but just see how many people in your country call Turkey Türkiye (they made a request back in 2022) - and that was just one country, not all.

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  • [–] 5 points 8 months ago (3 children)

    They already call it Turkije which is a lot closer to Türkiye.

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  • [–] 4 points 8 months ago (2 children)

    That's admirable! I looked it up in translate and got a completely different result. I think I know what was going on : ) 🦃

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  • [–] 18 points 8 months ago (7 children)

    The weirdest ones are the Finns, calling Germany Saksa.
    I'm German and I feel more at home when I'm in Finland than in Sachsen.

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  • [–] 6 points 8 months ago (4 children)

    What about the Portuguese! ALEMANHA for Germany

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  • [–] 10 points 8 months ago (3 children)

    In Grench it’s Allemagne. The Alemanni were a german tribe at the rhine.

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  • [–] 14 points 8 months ago (1 child)

    Not any weirder than any other English speaking country.

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  • [–] 12 points 8 months ago (4 children)

    English speakers call Deutschland Germany, don't give us all the credit here. And it's called that cause the UK hated keeping track of what y'all were calling yourselves, so they chose bigotry instead (a common theme for England). The rest of us usually don't know the history and just have a word with no context as to why it is that way.

    For those Americans who don't understand, calling it Germany is like calling First Nation land "Indialand" because "how can anyone keep track of what they call it? It's always changing!"

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  • [–] 6 points 8 months ago (3 children)

    Actually, it was the Romans who came up with the term "Germani" for the various tribes at the nortthern end of the world. The anglo-saxons being one of them.

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  • [–] 0 points 8 months ago (2 children)

    Yeah, just like it was an Italian man that first called them Indians. Wouldn't make it Italy's fault if Americans called it Indialand, though.

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  • [–] 1 point 8 months ago (1 child)

    So Americans alone are at fault for using the term German in English then? The chain of logic here is impressive I’ll say that.

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  • [–] 1 point 8 months ago

    Really? That's why I got a down vote? Dude, my metaphor in the first comment was likening it to "if we (Americans) called First Nation land 'Indialand'". So, no. If you map the metaphor back onto to the counter, it's the UK's fault, not America's.

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  • [–] 4 points 8 months ago (4 children)

    Why put that on the US? We just carried on calling it what the English did.

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  • [–] 5 points 8 months ago (3 children)

    To spur discussion, mostly

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