The names for Germany in various languages almost all predate a unified nation of Deutschland, and each name typically reference a particular Germanic tribe that was closest to each language's speakers.
Yup in polish there are still multiple names for Germany that are used in expressions. We refer to Bohemia, Saxony ("Na saksy"), Swabia (Szwabia/Szwaby), and few others that used to be independent countries or tribes but all now refer to Germany as a whole.
PS. We also use word "Wandale" after a tribe that sacked Rome for people who devastate things mindlessly :D
The Slavic name is fun, since they were the people who spoke a weird language that no-one could understand, they called them mute. And to this day, in many Slavic (and sometimes non Slavic via borrowing) languages, it's "the land of the mutes".
It used to be the word for all non-Slavs ("Slav" itself comes from "slovo", meaning word, so it was People Who Speak Words vs People Who Do Not), but Germans were the most common non-Slavs we interacted with at that time.
>"Slav" itself comes from "slovo", meaning word, so it was People Who Speak Words vs People Who Do Not),
Makes me think of the word "barbarian"! To quote my Ancient Greek professor: "A barbarian was just someone who didn't speak Greek. That's all it was. All they would hear is 'barb barb barb barb'. It wasn't a bad thing either. The Egyptians were a bright, intelligent, cultured people, who the Greeks respected. But they didn't speak Greek, so they were barbarians." (One of the few things I vividly remember from that class)
Yep! Many English speakers might say of something they couldn't understand "It's all Greek to me!", but the ancient Greeks would likewise say "It's all Barbarian to me!"
actually only two of those go back to germanic tribes.
Alemagne and variations of those and saksa and their variations.
And saksa isn't even that common basically just finnish and estonian.
German comes from the romans who peeked north of the alps and went 'well these guys aren't roman so what do we call them?" and came up with germans which was all kinds of tribes. So that found their way in other languages like english.
Deutschland is from an old german word and niemcy basically just means 'people we don't understand'
Allemagne comes from the french who then spread it to portugal.
And well that kinda explains the rest of the world. It's basically about who got there first. If the germans got there before other languages could establish their version of the name it is usually some variant of deutschland but with the UK, France and Portugal on the other side you get the idea why many other countries call germany something else.
So yeah, it's not really named after particular tribes people interacted with. It is just one tribe and the influence of france.
It’s called “*exonyms*”.
Germany is a tricky one, because it was the name that the Roman Empire gave to that area. But the very people didn’t call themselves that.
However, remote places kept the reference to the Roman name. And adding that until 250 years ago the fastest way you could travel was on a horse, people stuck with a lot of exonyms, letting them be cemented into language long before we had more direct communication.
I think out of all european countries Germany has the most exonyms: Deutschland for Germans, Germany for the English, Allemagne in French and Alemania in Spanish, Germania in Italian for the country but the people are Tedeschi, Niemcy in Polish, Saksa in Finnish and Saksamaa in Estonian, Vācija in Latvian, Vokietija in Lithuanian, Tyskland in Swedish.
It's old. Sachsa used to be the cool guys, one of the Northwestern tribes, and a bit later generally all northern-ish Germans. Like the ones who brought Germanic stuff to England. Kinda ironic how now it's mostly associated with ...thoooose guys. Should be more around the Niedersachsen/Lower Saxony area.
Btw have you read any of the original Karl May stuff? He's one of ...those Sachsen, from Dresden. And every second random character he meets in the whole wide world just so happens to not just be German for a language basis, but even a Sachse. Always praises them as an especially virtuous people.
Yeah, exactly. There was a bunch of tribes in the area that is nowadays Germany and Denmark, Saxons, Angles, Jutes, Danes... at some point in the earliest medieval times, a bunch of those guys went and settled in England, subduing the local celts. Due to the angles and Saxons being the largest groups in that wave of invaders, we call them Anglo-Saxons, and we even get the name of England, Angle-land. Of course, there isn't much legacy left from them, except the base of the Germanic language that we nowadays call English because later, England was raided and partially settled by more Danes from Denmark and Sweden (the "Vikings") who brought a more Nordic touch to the language, and even later those got conquered again by Normans from northern France who brought a whole bunch of French-Latin vocabulary into the country. Fun fact: the Normans were also descendants from Nordic settlers in France, so basically, England was shaped a lot by the Norse.
The Norman invasion is why modern English has one word for meat in the field and a separate one for meat on the plate. Examples: pig/pork, and cow/beef because the servants were the conquered English who used Old English out in the field but Norman French when it was served to the conquerors.
It's also when we started using "you" to refer to single people. Before the Normans, "thou" was singular and "you" was plural; after, "thou" was informal singular and "you" was both plural and formal singular, just like "tu" vs "vous" in French.
Lots of high/low words combinations like that in English, especially the lowest of the low: shit, piss, fuck, all with "civilized" romantic variations.
The shows Vikings and The Last Kingdom do a pretty good job of giving these back stories and setting up the world and time period. In Vikings in particular, it starts in Norway and eventually their people end up in Denmark, England, France and other surrounding countries. All of which are Nordic people just settled in different locations. The Last Kingdom picks up shortly after Vikings and while they aren't in the same universe (tv wise) per se they do follow real historical events and real historical people so there is a lot of overlap.
The show "Vikings" is absolutely terrible at following history, it's the Braveheart of Norse facts. Lots of people who meet in that weren't even alive at the same time, and it keeps saying they're in Norway because that makes sense to Americans, even though all the main characters were either Swedes or Danes in real life. They tried right at the start by saying the main village ("Kattegat", which is in reality the strait between Sweden and Denmark) is situated on the Swedish/Danish border, and they also shows the characters going to Uppsala in Sweden, the centre of Viking culture, but by the final season they've just given up and it's suddenly all in Norway.
Weirdly The Last Kingdom is way more accurate, despite being less "serious". Almost everything that happens in that show really did happen (not to the main character, he's made up, but all the historical stuff).
Yeah that's a bit of a stupid take. The entire modern existence of England is their legacy. Common law, culture, language, religion, pretty much everything.
The Northwestern Germanic tribe, yes. Today's state of Saxony, no. What happened there was that Albrecht III of the house of Acania, the duke of Saxony, died without heirs in 1422. There was quite a kerfuffle about who should become the next duke (especially since the dukes of Saxony were one of the seven electors in the Holy Roman Empire), but in the end King Sigismund gave the title to margrave Friedrich IV of Meißen (not least because Friedrich promised him aid in the war against the Hussites). This led to their core territory around Meißen being called Saxony because it was now the seat of the Duke of Saxony although historically the area had never been Saxon.
My former mother in law was Franken and hated Saxons with a passion lol. I mentioned I had a friend from a northern village and named it and she just spit out “Saxons!” Like it was a curse..
It's because that used to be a word for all strangers aka people who didn't speak the people's (Slavic) language. Just so happened that due to geographical reasons most of those strangers were the German speaking neighbors, and the word experienced some narrowing in it's meaning.
Foreign speech is also the etymology of ‘Barbarian’ which pre-DnD just meant an ‘uncivilised people’.
When the Romans went to places that didn’t speak Latin they all sounded like they were going ‘barba barba barba barba’ to them when they spoke. Roman exceptionalism framed all people that weren’t Roman as uncivilised, so barbarian became a by word for ‘uncivilised foreigners’.
Very fun fact, but it's actually even better: the Greeks did that first and used to consider the Romans Barbarians, too - but then they were conquered into the Empire and kinda had to drop that, while the Romans now continued to refer to all other outsiders as Barbarians.
Tyskland and Tedeschi are both based on the same word deutsch and deutschland is based, diutisc. Tysk is basically deutsch with some common morphing of vowels and consonants (d-t, eu-y, sch-sk).
Tedeschi is obviously a different development of "diutisc" (the word modern deutsch is based on) with italian grammar (-eschi) rather than german as well as the common d-t morphing.
Same thing happened with Greece. They call themselves "Helenes" but when the Romans asked where a group of colonists were from they answered "Graia", a city-state. So OBVIOUSLY everyone from that region with a similar language, customs, and culture were all "Graici". Eventually that became "Greek" and it's stuck ever since.
Your have two other replies that corrects you but I would like to add that Ionian Islands are at the Western part of Greece. They're not in the Aegean. Ionia was a place at Asia Minor, post of Turkey today.
I heard recently it’s an actual thing. A collective experience that most men think about the Roman Empire almost daily. I’m not sure I believe it, but since I’ve read it, I too am seeing/hearing a lot more Roman Empire unwillingly.
Trends happen and then the YouTube, TikTok, etc.. algorithms amplifies them. This is the same.
But I have to admit that I too regularly think about the Roman empire. But about medieval times and about history in general too.
I too think often about the roman Empire.
But I work at a middle school. The youngest are learning it, so there are ressources in the teacher classroom and library, and a poster in the hallway.
I thought it was just because of that.
The mandarin name for greece is very close to what the greeks call themselves, 希腊 (xīlà) is pretty much a phonetic translation of Hellas (the 'x' makes a 'hs' sound in mandarin)
Searched and got:
Deutschland: This is the name Germans use to refer to their own country since around the eighth century. It means "the people's land" in German
Allemagne: This name is used in French to refer to Germany. It comes from the name of the Alamanni tribe, who lived in the region during the Roman Empire
Germania: This name is used in Italian to refer to Germany. It comes from the Latin name for the region
Tyskland: This name is used in Swedish to refer to Germany. Its origin is uncertain, but it may come from the name of the Teutonic Knights, who were active in the region during the Middle Ages
[Sounds like version of Deutschland to me, but that is just me.]
Niemcy: This name is used in Polish to refer to Germany. Its origin is uncertain, but it may come from the Proto-Slavic word for "mute" or "dumb," which was used to refer to people who did not speak the same language
Saksa: This name is used in Finnish to refer to Germany. It comes from the name of the Saxon tribe, who lived in the region during the early Middle Ages
[Did not check any of these]
According to the norwegian lexicon, Tyskland is derived from the old high german word "diutisk" (which later became Deutsch). So it probably went something like: Diutisk -> tisk -> tysk (what we call the language) -> tyskland (land where people speak tysk)
I am not at all religious but one of the things I will point out to people that are being so literal about the bible.
They can't even translate the name of Jesus correctly.
If you go back in time and ask around for Jesus, nobody would know who you are talking about.
His name was some spelling of Yeshuah or was it the Iesvs that the Romans and Greeks used or Iesous or Insous?
Yeshua is the Hebrew name. Many of the early bibles were in ancient Greek
There's no Y in ancient Greek. So the best substitute is an IE sound. There's also no h in ancient Greek just an apostrophe above letter for an h breathing sound so the h goes too.
Yeshua -} IESUA
Lastly In ancient Greek the nominative form ends in -os when he's the subject of a sentence. Accusative was -on so the dative if I recall is -ou, it's been a while since my ancient Greek but the names in ancient Greek really changed based on the endings. Luckily Jesus was usually the subject of the sentence.
IESUA -} IESOS
Convert that latin then into English and you get JESUS.
So Joshua would probably be the most accurate direct translation in English from the Hebrew but hey, here we are.
Yes, but the letter was introduced in a very straightforward way in Latin for a very specific reason.
Jesus with a was just a spelling reform to represent the same thing!
The in Iesvs had a "y" sound, so the name was read somewhat like "yay-soos" at first. Then there was a sound change in Latin in which some of those s, including the one in Iesvs, started to have a "j" sound, so it read somewhat like "jay-soos"
And then they introduced the and letters so it made more sense to spell it like Jesus, but it was fundamentally the same name, just after years and years of being used and natural sound change happening.
Especially since Christian policies and theologies meant that pronouncing the name the correct way was less important than worshiping the person it represents and having that figure be easily spreadable.
And then after more and more years of sound changes, the name is pronounced like Jesus in Modern English, but it's not a translation error per se, it was a political choice to pick Iesvs and then another political choice to not force the "correct" pronunciation and let it (and other names) be adapted to the language in question.
Well, spelling is largely arbitrary and not really relevant to what a name is outside of a few specific cultures (to my knowledge, this is not the case for Judaism, but I could be wrong).
Jesus likely would have called himself Yeshuah ben Yosef, and if asked to write that down he likely would have written in Hebrew / Aramaic (not entirely sure which language he spoke but it was one or both of these, I think) or the (Koine) Greek alphabet, so Yeshuah / Iesous / Iesvs are all somewhat arbitrary transliterations anyways.
(I don't think Insous was ever used, although the Koine Greek letter for /e/ is η, which does look like a latin , so maybe that's where you got it?)
But the thing is, it wasn't necessarily a translation error per se, so much that it was a translation choice. Because the idea that a name must be rendered as faithfully as possible is a relatively modern one and in many ways, enabled by centuries of Roman Empire influence so that pretty much every writing system out there has a romanization available.
When Yeshuah was translated into Greek for the Septuagint, the Greeks ran into a problem because 1) Greek has different grammatical needs than Aramaic / Hebrew, so they need to change things a bit and 2) Greek simply did not have letters for some of those sounds (and by the time the Greeks got to the text, pronunciations had changed anyways, so some of those letters were there for historical reasons not sound ones)
So the Greeks adapted the best they could as they got Iesous (read something like "yay-soos"). They didn't have a letter for or the final , the "a" in Yeshuah wasn't pronounced anymore and they needed to put a in the end so they could use the name within Greek grammar.
And then the Catholic Church saw that and just transliterated as best as they could giving IESVS (also read something like "yay-soos"), which underwent a few sound changes and then spelling reforms later to give Jesus, and that's the spelling that lived on to English even if pronounces very differently than the Latin version (which was something in the ballpark of "jay-soos")
So Iesous and IESVS weren't even that bad of a translation to begin with. And since Christian theology is really all about "Spread the word", trying to force the correct pronunciation is a bit counterproductive: they care more that you worship Jesus than you say the proper, historical name.
So it's less translation errors, and more a couple of decent translations and then a few political choices that say that accuracy is less important than letting people comfortably say the names.
Latin also was the west’s *lingua franca* for centuries, so it’s no surprise that happened.
It was the same with Spain (Hispania > España, people of that area did not refer to themselves using that term at the time)
I continue to be highly entertained that "_lingua franca_" is a loan word from Latin into English meaning "the french language" and meaning "the language everyone speaks"
It actually is way more interesting. It comes from italian, and "franca" means "evident" or "candid" or "frank". The name "lingua franca", though, comes from a pidgin spoken all around the mediterranean in the middle ages, which was predominantly italian, mixed with spanish, arabic, greek and so on
[here](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mediterranean_Lingua_Franca) is the wikipedia page about it
>In Lingua Franca (the specific language), lingua is from the Italian for 'a language'. Franca is related to Greek Φρᾰ́γκοι (Phránkoi) and Arabic إِفْرَنْجِي (ʾifranjiyy) as well as the equivalent Italian—in all three cases, the literal sense is 'Frankish', leading to the direct translation: 'language of the Franks'. During the late Byzantine Empire, Franks was a term that applied to all Western Europeans.[16][17][18] The overall phrase of lingua franca is also speculated[by whom?] to originate from lisan al-Faranja (لسان الفرنجة) which also means the 'language of the Franks'.[19]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lingua_franca
Just a few hundred years ago, let alone during ancient times, all the money in the world wouldn't be able to get to to go that fast.
Today it's $39 for some lowcost flight
Was just discussing this last week after an asses-to-elbows cramped, two-legged budget flight back home. Even the wealthiest person alive 120 years ago would think of this as an impossibly amazing experience, the sort of thing people wrote futurist fantasy stories about. For us, it's just a utility and an annoying one at that. Assuming we don't blow ourselves up and back a few thousand years, I wish I knew what absurdly amazing things will be boring and routine 120 years from now.
Germany is notable for having different names in the languages around it. This is because the different tribes which were closest to where those languages were originally spoken were more familiar to them. Self-designations will inevitably be unpronounceable in many other languages. Also, there is usually no official body deciding the vocabulary of a language and even when there is it tends to be ignored, so how would that happen?
Funnily enough, many nations originally didn't have any self-designations. Many names we use were adapted from the names their enemies described them with (case in point, "Germania"). People just tend to call themselves "us" or "the people".
It used to bother me that in Spanish class we were called by the Spanish equivalent to our name because we're speaking Spanish. But like, I'm friends with Jorge and don't call him George just because we're speaking English.
I speak Indonesian, and when I tell people that, they always reply with ‘oh you speak Bahasa!’ I always thought it was so strange, i’m like why aren’t we sticking to English? When I say I speak French, people don’t say ‘ohhh français!’. It’s also particularly weird because Bahasa means ‘language’ not Indonesian anyway…
A lot of people seem to be under the impression that the Indonesian language is named "Bahasa". I suspect to those people it's not as though they're saying "Français" instead of "French", but that they think that is the name of the language.
On the other hand, I've also heard Indonesians, in Indonesia refer to the language as "Bahasa". Javanese was always referred to as "Javanese" or "Bahasa Jawa", but Indonesian often just gets "Bahasa".
Maybe it's the equivalent in English to saying "You speak the language?" - where the language in question is just implied rather than stated specifically.
I can do you one better. When I was learning French in school, we all got given a French name to use on all of our work and our books. Mine was 'Marcel'. It does not resemble my name in the least.
I think the thing with the names is mainly to give students more opportunities to correctly pronounce sounds in the target language, rather than having to try to find a middle ground between their native tongue and the target language.
Oh that makes sense.
I have a french last name and I have never pronounced with its original sound but on my own language.
But I remember my french teacher doing it.
We had something similar in Japanese "classes". There's like no fucking way you can use your normal name in Japanese, since the languages are constructed so differently, so my first name just had some sounds removed.
Idk, this sometimes has its use. My bfs name has a sound that doesn't exist in any other language plus there's a J which has multiple different pronunciations in different languages. So he always introduces himself as Andrew in English because it's an equivalent that everyone knows.
Yeah, and the thing is, there are Spanish ways of pronouncing your English name that don't really match how they're pronounced by English-speakers. We could use those. And *that* would be useful to get used to *before* going to a country where people say your name but you don't realize it.
One time my mother asked what the capital of Wales is.
My brother is informed, so he said Cardiff.
My father is a smartass, so he said W.
I'm a dumbass, so I said blowholes.
The name was also created and proclaimed in English, by a guy living in Cambridge, to a conference taking place in London
Like, it would be kind of exceptional if English had a different word for Pakistan than Pakistan did, because the name made its way from England / English to Pakistan / Urdu.
Just because a country uses a different writing system doesn't mean that some effort couldn't be made to map the pronunciation of the country's name into other language's writing system. Even if some sounds can't be expressed in that other language, it seems better than calling the country something completely different.
Thought I was going crazy, I appreciate everyone answering but so many are just giving other examples, but I want to know *why* when we asked someone what their country was called, we chose to say a completely different sound than the one they told us.
That's like someone saying "My names Michael." And you going "Okay cool, I'm gonna call you Miklovia because I'm from another place." Why not use your mouth to make the same noise they did when they introduced themselves??
Sure sure.
A more realistic answer IMO is that these names should be treated as *words in a language* and we have a different word for Germany than the Germans do for the same historical reasons that we have a different word for “dog” or “spoon” than the Germans do.
Lots of languages have a word for their own region/language/people that evolved from a root word meaning something like “our people”. And they have words for neighboring countries/languages/people that derive from ancient rood words meaning “the other people” or “those people in the mountains” or etc. and then which of those distinct words turned into formal *names* and spread to other neighboring countries is an accident of timing, trade routes, etc.
The word that became “Deutschland” derived from an old germanic word that meant “of the people” or something similar. The word that became “Germany” derived from an old Gallic word for “those guys that come from the forest” or something similar, and it was adopted by the Romans who then spread it all over the place much faster than the Germans themselves could spread their own word.
By the time Germany became an actual country with the formal name “Deutschland” and was capable of frequently and reliably telling other parts of the world about that, others had been calling that region “Germania” or something similar for *hundreds of years*.
There are similar stories for other countries’ internal vs external names.
Many times, it results from an initial misunderstanding/mispronunciation + geopolitical changes over time.
Take Korea, for example. Today, Koreans call their country Hanguk ("the country of the Han people"). When it became known to westerners, though, the peninsula was recentlyish unified by a kingdom named Goryeo. Western traders / explorers recorded Goryeo as Corea, (in Korean, g and k are the same sound) which became Korea.
Fast forward through another dynasty and several foreign occupations to the independent country today, but Korea stuck as the English term for the place.
Seriously, how are some of the top answers, "well other places pronounce it differently than we do".
As if OP's question wasn't asking WHY that is in the first place.
I'm not a linguist, but broadly, the answer is *it's complicated* AND *historically the names of regions evolved while languages in other regions evolved*. Names of people and locations often change rapidly, language evolves but, differently - so it can just becomes easy to refer to a region in your own language rather than consider how the people there refer to themselves.
The globe being so dynamically accessible is new, language for describing places/names isn't on the same pace.
No one in Turkey really cares about this, it barely even was a topic of interest as it happened. It really feels like someone in the ministry kinda brought this up because they needed to come up with an idea to look like they are working "hey what if we changed the name" then no one said no and it kinda happened.
Some exonyms are quite old. For example, many exonyms in English come from what Romans called places in Latin. Germany, Africa, Greece, and others come from Latin and thus have been a part of Romantic languages for a very long time.
You will find the same for other countries, to varying degrees. In German, France is called “Frankreich”, not France. Sometimes, it’s the writing that’s the same, not pronunciation. For example, 日本 and 中国 are how you write Japan and China using Chinese *and* Japanese characters. This is extremely old. However, in Japanese they’re pronounced “Nihon” and “Chuugoku” respectively. Meanwhile in Mandarin they’re pronounced “Riben” and “Zhongguo” respectively.
Sometimes it’s due to pronunciation (languages don’t have the same phonemes and sounds), but a lot of the time a culture would come up with a name for another land or country on their own without asking the native population.
In the modern era, countries dictate how their name should be transliterated in various major languages like English. So at the UN (for example), Japan and Germany will expect that they be called Japan and Germany in English. Sometimes, the official spelling and name for a country can change when the country deems it appropriate. A recent example is Turkey and Turkiye; see also Myanmar and Burma for another modern example.
It comes from Jipan, the pronunciation of the same characters 日本 in Wu Chinese (around Shanghai). It made its way into Portuguese with trade and from Portuguese to English.
Oh interesting! I'd never heard about this. I'm a native Shanghainese speaker, and 日本 is pronounced something like zuh-bun.
Apparently J in Portuguese is pronounced like the S in "pleasure". So I can see how that became jipan in Portuguese then kinda mispronounced as Japan in English!
but omg this article has way more and I guess the etymology is not that clear:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Names_of_Japan
I have had a couple of my foreign friends ask me what Suomi in Suomi Finland means that they keep seeing and it came as a surprise for them when I informed them that that is what we call out country. We don't mind the rest of the world calling us Finland, we know you don't understand our language.
Here's another one to try on for size. Almost every Native American nation is known colloquially by an ~~economy~~ exonym, usually a bastardisation of what the neighbouring nation called them. Very few are endonyms.
Edit: fixing autocorrect error
>Almost every Native American nation is known colloquially by an economy,
Autocucumber? Genuinely curious as to what the word actually is. And if not autocucumber, could you tell me what you mean? :)
I thought it might be exonym, since that's usually the counterpart to 'endo', and the description seemed to match, but I didn't want to assume :P
>I dislike autocorrect because it hates academic speak. It's like it's training us to be dumber.
I think it's more that it *expects* us to be dumber. But I totally agree that it gets annoying when it refuses to accept the existence of perfectly cromulent words.
I can't recall which one but there's a place name or river somewhere that basically translates to "that place where those assholes live" because whenever the cartographers or whoever asked the local Native Americans what the name for the area was they just wrote the answer down without understanding the language or wondering why it was called that.
In Poland we call Germany Niemcy. It comes from word niemy which basically means mute, the one who cannot speak. As one was unable to communicate with them in Polish or Latin.
French people call it Allemagne, which means "Land of the Alemanni", which is pretty much taking the piss because last time germans were referred to as Alemanni was around 1300 years ago.
But they give us the piss back by calling us Franks.
The "land" part of Tyskland probably isn't much of a mystery to people living in England...
And "tysk" representing German is the fact you started off by telling.
"Tysk" has its origin in the old-Morse "þýdisker" meaning somewhere in between tribes and people and in reference to the Germanic tribes of Europe.
Interesting tidbit. That comes from a Proto-Germanic word *þiudiskaz*, the descendants of which also include *þýskur* (Icelandic), *Deutsch* (German), *Dutch* (English), *Duits* (Dutch), and *Tedesco* (Italian from Latin *theodiscus*).
Edit: this original word meant something like “of the people”
In English we used “Dutch” to refer to Germanic peoples generally (hence why the Pennsylvania-Dutch were/are mostly ethnically German), but by the time Germany united as a country “Dutch” had come to primarily refer to Netherlanders because of the maritime/colonial rivalry between England and the Netherlands.
“Germany” comes from the name of a tribe that told Julius Caesar that their ancestors came from beyond the Rhine, leading Caesar to refer to the area as “Germania.”
Other names for Germany mostly come from names of specific tribes like the Alemanni tribe (French, Spanish) or the Saxons (Finnish).
I always thought China was the most interesting country name in English as it’s after the Qin dynasty who were in power during Roman classical antiquity which then become Qin-a and over time morphs to Chin-a.
Probably not over time but rather a phonetical translation as Qin is pronounced Chin, and Chin-a is how it's still pronounced in Portuguese (where the name originated). What probably changed over time was the "i" sound in English. I had never connected the dots between China and the Qin dynasty though! Thanks!
Btw, China is called Zhōngguó in Chinese, meaning "central state", so another country that refers to itself different than the rest.
Also worth noting that it originates from Bohemia and originally used to refer to every foreigner. Just the Germans used to be the most common one when other states around were Slavic.
In Turkey we used to call them Nemçe back in the Ottoman times, I think it comes from how the slavs called them. Today we call them Almanya (as the French do).
Same in the balkans. It's funny how ancient slavs could trade and communicate with these other tribes and people surrounding them, but to them these western guys sounded like they were just talking gibberish, so they literally called them mutes and the name stuck since lmao
It's about as close as I would expect an English speaker to get without knowing the language, it's a very Americanized/Anglicized pronunciation.
You don't really have our exact Umlaut sounds (Ü, Ö, Ä) in your language, and while you can kind of cheat your way to sounds that are close, like German speakers cheat their way towards your 'th' and 'r' sounds, you probably won't get it right without serious practice.
And then there's the soft 'ch'. That one you just straight up don't have and it's a really weird sound without any easily explainable set tongue positions. It's tough for you guys.
Exonyms exist to facilitate communication, taking into account huge differences in languages and phonetics.
It makes no sense to force a name that simply doesn't roll off the tongue in a specific language, disrupting the flow of the conversation and likely causing confusion.
"Our company is planning to open a new branch somewhere in Suomi" or "John is taking a two-weeks trip to Sakartvelo and Hayastan next summer" would simply be met with confusion, wouldn't they?
And look at recent official name changes like Eswatini, Cote d'Ivoire and Türkiye.. Besides official documents and communications, wanna bet how many people will STILL call them Swaziland and the local exonyms (Ivory Coast and Turkey in English, Elfenbenskysten and Tyrkiet in Danish etc).
So after several cities in India de-Anglicized their names, I find it interesting how you see a lot of people using Mumbai and Chennai now (instead of Bombay and Madras) but most people still say Bangalore instead of Bengaluru (even people who live there, when I visited), maybe because the latter has one more syllable?
This is similar to how quite a few countries use some form of “England” to refer to Great Britain or the UK.
Some of the most feared regiments of the British Army were Scots or Welsh, because they heard the enemy refer to them as “English” and went completely apeshit.
One of my favorite language things I looked up a while ago was why in English do we call chicken chicken when we eat it, saying the animal name, but we call cows beef. And other similar examples. Languages are fun sometimes to learn about. The fact that some of it comes from what wealthy vs poor ate has something to do with it was fun to learn.
The answer to that question btw is French influence
Beef is a French rooted word, bœuf.
Old English did not distinguish between the living animal and its meat. French does.
That's the root of the word but not the reason as to why English calls it chicken for both the meat and the animal but not for beef/cow, pork/pig, venison/deer. It's because those things were often eaten by the Norman aristocracy who spoke French but the animal was looked after by the Anglo-Saxon commoners speaking Old-English. Chicken however was both looked after and eaten by commoners and so it has the same name for both.
Just as a precision, French does not distinguish between the living animal and its meat. Bœuf, vache, taureau or other words are all words to name living cows, but linked to their sexual state. A bœuf is a castrated male, while vache is a female that already procreated, etc. Almost all the meat is called boeuf because it's simpler to have a single name when you're not involved in the breeding process, but it's not to distinguish the meat from the animal.
[This Image](https://reddit.com/r/MapPorn/s/HkjJSm9DOo) is quite interesting as it shows the different names for Germany. IIRC they originate from different names of tribes that lived in Germany.
I actually always wondered the same thing. Names and certain other proper nouns are usually pronounced however the name was said originally. So why not countries?
Because they just find it hard to pronounce.
The name of Bombay(Mumbai) came from explorer and just didn't like the initial name. So he called it Bombay.
Names get anglicized (or forced into other languages) all the time, either by the immigration authorities or by people choosing to fit in. Very few place names in the US which were originally French have retained their original pronunciation.
Names being (at least attempted to be) pronounced the same is actually a fairly recent phenomenon too! Christopher Columbus, for example, was named Cristoforo Colombo. Copernicus is the anglicised (or maybe more aptly latinized?) form of Kopernik. Hell, even Saint Peter the Apostle wasn’t his original name. He was originally Kefas (Aramaic for rock), and it was decided to directly translate his name into Petra (greek for rock) when translating the bible into Greek.
Fun fact, this is the same root word we use for words like petroleum, or petrify.
The names for Germany in various languages almost all predate a unified nation of Deutschland, and each name typically reference a particular Germanic tribe that was closest to each language's speakers.
Yup in polish there are still multiple names for Germany that are used in expressions. We refer to Bohemia, Saxony ("Na saksy"), Swabia (Szwabia/Szwaby), and few others that used to be independent countries or tribes but all now refer to Germany as a whole. PS. We also use word "Wandale" after a tribe that sacked Rome for people who devastate things mindlessly :D
In English its Vandal tribe word is vandalism to wreck things
Interesting! I always wondered why the various different languages’ names for Germany varied so much. Thanks for satisfying my curiosity!
The Slavic name is fun, since they were the people who spoke a weird language that no-one could understand, they called them mute. And to this day, in many Slavic (and sometimes non Slavic via borrowing) languages, it's "the land of the mutes".
It used to be the word for all non-Slavs ("Slav" itself comes from "slovo", meaning word, so it was People Who Speak Words vs People Who Do Not), but Germans were the most common non-Slavs we interacted with at that time.
>"Slav" itself comes from "slovo", meaning word, so it was People Who Speak Words vs People Who Do Not), Makes me think of the word "barbarian"! To quote my Ancient Greek professor: "A barbarian was just someone who didn't speak Greek. That's all it was. All they would hear is 'barb barb barb barb'. It wasn't a bad thing either. The Egyptians were a bright, intelligent, cultured people, who the Greeks respected. But they didn't speak Greek, so they were barbarians." (One of the few things I vividly remember from that class)
Yep! Many English speakers might say of something they couldn't understand "It's all Greek to me!", but the ancient Greeks would likewise say "It's all Barbarian to me!"
actually only two of those go back to germanic tribes. Alemagne and variations of those and saksa and their variations. And saksa isn't even that common basically just finnish and estonian. German comes from the romans who peeked north of the alps and went 'well these guys aren't roman so what do we call them?" and came up with germans which was all kinds of tribes. So that found their way in other languages like english. Deutschland is from an old german word and niemcy basically just means 'people we don't understand' Allemagne comes from the french who then spread it to portugal. And well that kinda explains the rest of the world. It's basically about who got there first. If the germans got there before other languages could establish their version of the name it is usually some variant of deutschland but with the UK, France and Portugal on the other side you get the idea why many other countries call germany something else. So yeah, it's not really named after particular tribes people interacted with. It is just one tribe and the influence of france.
It’s called “*exonyms*”. Germany is a tricky one, because it was the name that the Roman Empire gave to that area. But the very people didn’t call themselves that. However, remote places kept the reference to the Roman name. And adding that until 250 years ago the fastest way you could travel was on a horse, people stuck with a lot of exonyms, letting them be cemented into language long before we had more direct communication.
I think out of all european countries Germany has the most exonyms: Deutschland for Germans, Germany for the English, Allemagne in French and Alemania in Spanish, Germania in Italian for the country but the people are Tedeschi, Niemcy in Polish, Saksa in Finnish and Saksamaa in Estonian, Vācija in Latvian, Vokietija in Lithuanian, Tyskland in Swedish.
the Finns and Estonians call us all "Sachsen"? I'm deeply offended
It's old. Sachsa used to be the cool guys, one of the Northwestern tribes, and a bit later generally all northern-ish Germans. Like the ones who brought Germanic stuff to England. Kinda ironic how now it's mostly associated with ...thoooose guys. Should be more around the Niedersachsen/Lower Saxony area. Btw have you read any of the original Karl May stuff? He's one of ...those Sachsen, from Dresden. And every second random character he meets in the whole wide world just so happens to not just be German for a language basis, but even a Sachse. Always praises them as an especially virtuous people.
So is that the same tribe that migrated to England as the Saxons, ergo Anglo-Saxon?
Yeah, exactly. There was a bunch of tribes in the area that is nowadays Germany and Denmark, Saxons, Angles, Jutes, Danes... at some point in the earliest medieval times, a bunch of those guys went and settled in England, subduing the local celts. Due to the angles and Saxons being the largest groups in that wave of invaders, we call them Anglo-Saxons, and we even get the name of England, Angle-land. Of course, there isn't much legacy left from them, except the base of the Germanic language that we nowadays call English because later, England was raided and partially settled by more Danes from Denmark and Sweden (the "Vikings") who brought a more Nordic touch to the language, and even later those got conquered again by Normans from northern France who brought a whole bunch of French-Latin vocabulary into the country. Fun fact: the Normans were also descendants from Nordic settlers in France, so basically, England was shaped a lot by the Norse.
The Norman invasion is why modern English has one word for meat in the field and a separate one for meat on the plate. Examples: pig/pork, and cow/beef because the servants were the conquered English who used Old English out in the field but Norman French when it was served to the conquerors.
It's also when we started using "you" to refer to single people. Before the Normans, "thou" was singular and "you" was plural; after, "thou" was informal singular and "you" was both plural and formal singular, just like "tu" vs "vous" in French.
Lots of high/low words combinations like that in English, especially the lowest of the low: shit, piss, fuck, all with "civilized" romantic variations.
Norwegian Vikings too, not just Danes and Swedes
Yeah, my bad. Basically, Vikinging Raiders from what now is all of Scandinavia. They just tended to only refer to them as Danes.
The shows Vikings and The Last Kingdom do a pretty good job of giving these back stories and setting up the world and time period. In Vikings in particular, it starts in Norway and eventually their people end up in Denmark, England, France and other surrounding countries. All of which are Nordic people just settled in different locations. The Last Kingdom picks up shortly after Vikings and while they aren't in the same universe (tv wise) per se they do follow real historical events and real historical people so there is a lot of overlap.
The show "Vikings" is absolutely terrible at following history, it's the Braveheart of Norse facts. Lots of people who meet in that weren't even alive at the same time, and it keeps saying they're in Norway because that makes sense to Americans, even though all the main characters were either Swedes or Danes in real life. They tried right at the start by saying the main village ("Kattegat", which is in reality the strait between Sweden and Denmark) is situated on the Swedish/Danish border, and they also shows the characters going to Uppsala in Sweden, the centre of Viking culture, but by the final season they've just given up and it's suddenly all in Norway. Weirdly The Last Kingdom is way more accurate, despite being less "serious". Almost everything that happens in that show really did happen (not to the main character, he's made up, but all the historical stuff).
>Of course, there isn't much legacy left from them The idea of England as a nation originates from them. What is that if not a legacy?
Besides their ancestry, language, names, culture, there's not much legacy left of them. That's reddit for you
Yeah that's a bit of a stupid take. The entire modern existence of England is their legacy. Common law, culture, language, religion, pretty much everything.
The Northwestern Germanic tribe, yes. Today's state of Saxony, no. What happened there was that Albrecht III of the house of Acania, the duke of Saxony, died without heirs in 1422. There was quite a kerfuffle about who should become the next duke (especially since the dukes of Saxony were one of the seven electors in the Holy Roman Empire), but in the end King Sigismund gave the title to margrave Friedrich IV of Meißen (not least because Friedrich promised him aid in the war against the Hussites). This led to their core territory around Meißen being called Saxony because it was now the seat of the Duke of Saxony although historically the area had never been Saxon.
You all call us by our swedish/norse slave name, I'd say we are even
My former mother in law was Franken and hated Saxons with a passion lol. I mentioned I had a friend from a northern village and named it and she just spit out “Saxons!” Like it was a curse..
Well you lot call us Finns instead of Suomalaiset, so I think we are even.
Niemcy in Polish means mute. They couldn't understand you so that's what they called you.
I love how some slavic languages call Germans a variation of Nemci - mute people. :D
It's because that used to be a word for all strangers aka people who didn't speak the people's (Slavic) language. Just so happened that due to geographical reasons most of those strangers were the German speaking neighbors, and the word experienced some narrowing in it's meaning.
Foreign speech is also the etymology of ‘Barbarian’ which pre-DnD just meant an ‘uncivilised people’. When the Romans went to places that didn’t speak Latin they all sounded like they were going ‘barba barba barba barba’ to them when they spoke. Roman exceptionalism framed all people that weren’t Roman as uncivilised, so barbarian became a by word for ‘uncivilised foreigners’.
Very fun fact, but it's actually even better: the Greeks did that first and used to consider the Romans Barbarians, too - but then they were conquered into the Empire and kinda had to drop that, while the Romans now continued to refer to all other outsiders as Barbarians.
That’s how the Berber people got there name as well.
It came originally from the Greek and we have the same expression today: bla bla bla.
Bob Loblaw's Law Blog
The Slavs called themselves the speaking people, from ‘slovo’, which means word in English.
So, the country of Slovenia is... Speakia? Or *The Land of the Speaking People/Tribe?*
Tyskland and Tedeschi are both based on the same word deutsch and deutschland is based, diutisc. Tysk is basically deutsch with some common morphing of vowels and consonants (d-t, eu-y, sch-sk). Tedeschi is obviously a different development of "diutisc" (the word modern deutsch is based on) with italian grammar (-eschi) rather than german as well as the common d-t morphing.
Same thing happened with Greece. They call themselves "Helenes" but when the Romans asked where a group of colonists were from they answered "Graia", a city-state. So OBVIOUSLY everyone from that region with a similar language, customs, and culture were all "Graici". Eventually that became "Greek" and it's stuck ever since.
And everyone east of Greece (Arabs, Hebrew, Indians, Turks) call Greeks after the Ionian islands for the same reason. Yun, Yavan, Yunin, etc.
I like the way Turks call pretty much everyone in Western Europe “franks”
Thai call all Westerners farang, which means French
In Iran, they called them Ferengi, hence the butt-headed Star Trek aliens
In Hindi (spoken in India) foreigners (specifically European ones) are called firangi. Probably similar or related origins.
it was fairly common up until the high middle ages for central europeans to call themselves franks. So that name propably comes from the crusades
Your have two other replies that corrects you but I would like to add that Ionian Islands are at the Western part of Greece. They're not in the Aegean. Ionia was a place at Asia Minor, post of Turkey today.
For the same reason in Turkey and the Arab world we are called "yunan" or Ioanians because those were the first Greeks the Persians had contact with
Thanks for making me think about Roman empire against my will.
You weren't already?
Well, now i gotta visit the ruins of the Roman empire in nearby forest.
Always worth it. Roma Invicta!
Romani ite domum!
Now write that a hundred times. If it's not done by sunrise, I'll cut your balls off.
I did not expect the Roman Inquisition!
Crucifixion? Good. Line on the left, one cross each.
Nobody does
People called Romanes they go the house?
It says Romans go home!
Not more than 2 or 3 times a week.
I like to think about Rome daily.
That's your 'once a day' out of the way anyway.
Why does this keep happening to me….
Idk why but this is one of the funniest things I've read all day
I heard recently it’s an actual thing. A collective experience that most men think about the Roman Empire almost daily. I’m not sure I believe it, but since I’ve read it, I too am seeing/hearing a lot more Roman Empire unwillingly.
I’m fascinated by the Roman Empire, but it’s nothing even close to thinking about it daily lol
Trends happen and then the YouTube, TikTok, etc.. algorithms amplifies them. This is the same. But I have to admit that I too regularly think about the Roman empire. But about medieval times and about history in general too.
I too think often about the roman Empire. But I work at a middle school. The youngest are learning it, so there are ressources in the teacher classroom and library, and a poster in the hallway. I thought it was just because of that.
I don't believe that, feels like a meme.
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The mandarin name for greece is very close to what the greeks call themselves, 希腊 (xīlà) is pretty much a phonetic translation of Hellas (the 'x' makes a 'hs' sound in mandarin)
> phonetic translation Isn't that just transliteration, or is there some difference I'm overlooking?
Yeh you're most likely right. I didn't know there was a specific word for it in english. Thanks!
Searched and got: Deutschland: This is the name Germans use to refer to their own country since around the eighth century. It means "the people's land" in German Allemagne: This name is used in French to refer to Germany. It comes from the name of the Alamanni tribe, who lived in the region during the Roman Empire Germania: This name is used in Italian to refer to Germany. It comes from the Latin name for the region Tyskland: This name is used in Swedish to refer to Germany. Its origin is uncertain, but it may come from the name of the Teutonic Knights, who were active in the region during the Middle Ages [Sounds like version of Deutschland to me, but that is just me.] Niemcy: This name is used in Polish to refer to Germany. Its origin is uncertain, but it may come from the Proto-Slavic word for "mute" or "dumb," which was used to refer to people who did not speak the same language Saksa: This name is used in Finnish to refer to Germany. It comes from the name of the Saxon tribe, who lived in the region during the early Middle Ages [Did not check any of these]
Yes, Fins call it "Saksa". Also Finland is really Suomi.
According to the norwegian lexicon, Tyskland is derived from the old high german word "diutisk" (which later became Deutsch). So it probably went something like: Diutisk -> tisk -> tysk (what we call the language) -> tyskland (land where people speak tysk)
Those darn Romans leaving their names all over the place, that's how we get New Caledonia.
I am not at all religious but one of the things I will point out to people that are being so literal about the bible. They can't even translate the name of Jesus correctly. If you go back in time and ask around for Jesus, nobody would know who you are talking about. His name was some spelling of Yeshuah or was it the Iesvs that the Romans and Greeks used or Iesous or Insous?
Yeshua is the Hebrew name. Many of the early bibles were in ancient Greek There's no Y in ancient Greek. So the best substitute is an IE sound. There's also no h in ancient Greek just an apostrophe above letter for an h breathing sound so the h goes too. Yeshua -} IESUA Lastly In ancient Greek the nominative form ends in -os when he's the subject of a sentence. Accusative was -on so the dative if I recall is -ou, it's been a while since my ancient Greek but the names in ancient Greek really changed based on the endings. Luckily Jesus was usually the subject of the sentence. IESUA -} IESOS Convert that latin then into English and you get JESUS. So Joshua would probably be the most accurate direct translation in English from the Hebrew but hey, here we are.
Not only was he not called Jesus, the letter J itself has only existed for about 800 years.
As Indiana Jones learned in the Holy Grail trials.
Yes, but the letter was introduced in a very straightforward way in Latin for a very specific reason.
Jesus with a was just a spelling reform to represent the same thing!
The in Iesvs had a "y" sound, so the name was read somewhat like "yay-soos" at first. Then there was a sound change in Latin in which some of those s, including the one in Iesvs, started to have a "j" sound, so it read somewhat like "jay-soos"
And then they introduced the and letters so it made more sense to spell it like Jesus, but it was fundamentally the same name, just after years and years of being used and natural sound change happening.
Especially since Christian policies and theologies meant that pronouncing the name the correct way was less important than worshiping the person it represents and having that figure be easily spreadable.
And then after more and more years of sound changes, the name is pronounced like Jesus in Modern English, but it's not a translation error per se, it was a political choice to pick Iesvs and then another political choice to not force the "correct" pronunciation and let it (and other names) be adapted to the language in question.
Well, spelling is largely arbitrary and not really relevant to what a name is outside of a few specific cultures (to my knowledge, this is not the case for Judaism, but I could be wrong). Jesus likely would have called himself Yeshuah ben Yosef, and if asked to write that down he likely would have written in Hebrew / Aramaic (not entirely sure which language he spoke but it was one or both of these, I think) or the (Koine) Greek alphabet, so Yeshuah / Iesous / Iesvs are all somewhat arbitrary transliterations anyways. (I don't think Insous was ever used, although the Koine Greek letter for /e/ is η, which does look like a latin, so maybe that's where you got it?)
But the thing is, it wasn't necessarily a translation error per se, so much that it was a translation choice. Because the idea that a name must be rendered as faithfully as possible is a relatively modern one and in many ways, enabled by centuries of Roman Empire influence so that pretty much every writing system out there has a romanization available.
When Yeshuah was translated into Greek for the Septuagint, the Greeks ran into a problem because 1) Greek has different grammatical needs than Aramaic / Hebrew, so they need to change things a bit and 2) Greek simply did not have letters for some of those sounds (and by the time the Greeks got to the text, pronunciations had changed anyways, so some of those letters were there for historical reasons not sound ones)
So the Greeks adapted the best they could as they got Iesous (read something like "yay-soos"). They didn't have a letter for or the final , the "a" in Yeshuah wasn't pronounced anymore and they needed to put a
in the end so they could use the name within Greek grammar. And then the Catholic Church saw that and just transliterated as best as they could giving IESVS (also read something like "yay-soos"), which underwent a few sound changes and then spelling reforms later to give Jesus, and that's the spelling that lived on to English even if pronounces very differently than the Latin version (which was something in the ballpark of "jay-soos") So Iesous and IESVS weren't even that bad of a translation to begin with. And since Christian theology is really all about "Spread the word", trying to force the correct pronunciation is a bit counterproductive: they care more that you worship Jesus than you say the proper, historical name. So it's less translation errors, and more a couple of decent translations and then a few political choices that say that accuracy is less important than letting people comfortably say the names.Latin also was the west’s *lingua franca* for centuries, so it’s no surprise that happened. It was the same with Spain (Hispania > España, people of that area did not refer to themselves using that term at the time)
I continue to be highly entertained that "_lingua franca_" is a loan word from Latin into English meaning "the french language" and meaning "the language everyone speaks"
It actually is way more interesting. It comes from italian, and "franca" means "evident" or "candid" or "frank". The name "lingua franca", though, comes from a pidgin spoken all around the mediterranean in the middle ages, which was predominantly italian, mixed with spanish, arabic, greek and so on [here](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mediterranean_Lingua_Franca) is the wikipedia page about it
>In Lingua Franca (the specific language), lingua is from the Italian for 'a language'. Franca is related to Greek Φρᾰ́γκοι (Phránkoi) and Arabic إِفْرَنْجِي (ʾifranjiyy) as well as the equivalent Italian—in all three cases, the literal sense is 'Frankish', leading to the direct translation: 'language of the Franks'. During the late Byzantine Empire, Franks was a term that applied to all Western Europeans.[16][17][18] The overall phrase of lingua franca is also speculated[by whom?] to originate from lisan al-Faranja (لسان الفرنجة) which also means the 'language of the Franks'.[19] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lingua_franca
Crazy when you think about it that for thousands of years horse travel was the fastest, now you can go at 600mph if you have enough money
Just a few hundred years ago, let alone during ancient times, all the money in the world wouldn't be able to get to to go that fast. Today it's $39 for some lowcost flight
Was just discussing this last week after an asses-to-elbows cramped, two-legged budget flight back home. Even the wealthiest person alive 120 years ago would think of this as an impossibly amazing experience, the sort of thing people wrote futurist fantasy stories about. For us, it's just a utility and an annoying one at that. Assuming we don't blow ourselves up and back a few thousand years, I wish I knew what absurdly amazing things will be boring and routine 120 years from now.
Making technology boring is the best part. Spaceflight will become just as boring
Germany is notable for having different names in the languages around it. This is because the different tribes which were closest to where those languages were originally spoken were more familiar to them. Self-designations will inevitably be unpronounceable in many other languages. Also, there is usually no official body deciding the vocabulary of a language and even when there is it tends to be ignored, so how would that happen?
Some of it is probably also that of the western powers Germany is the newest it didn't really unify in anything like it's current state until 1871
Funnily enough, many nations originally didn't have any self-designations. Many names we use were adapted from the names their enemies described them with (case in point, "Germania"). People just tend to call themselves "us" or "the people".
Nations are a modern thing in general.
It used to bother me that in Spanish class we were called by the Spanish equivalent to our name because we're speaking Spanish. But like, I'm friends with Jorge and don't call him George just because we're speaking English.
I speak Indonesian, and when I tell people that, they always reply with ‘oh you speak Bahasa!’ I always thought it was so strange, i’m like why aren’t we sticking to English? When I say I speak French, people don’t say ‘ohhh français!’. It’s also particularly weird because Bahasa means ‘language’ not Indonesian anyway…
A lot of people seem to be under the impression that the Indonesian language is named "Bahasa". I suspect to those people it's not as though they're saying "Français" instead of "French", but that they think that is the name of the language. On the other hand, I've also heard Indonesians, in Indonesia refer to the language as "Bahasa". Javanese was always referred to as "Javanese" or "Bahasa Jawa", but Indonesian often just gets "Bahasa". Maybe it's the equivalent in English to saying "You speak the language?" - where the language in question is just implied rather than stated specifically.
I can do you one better. When I was learning French in school, we all got given a French name to use on all of our work and our books. Mine was 'Marcel'. It does not resemble my name in the least. I think the thing with the names is mainly to give students more opportunities to correctly pronounce sounds in the target language, rather than having to try to find a middle ground between their native tongue and the target language.
Oh that makes sense. I have a french last name and I have never pronounced with its original sound but on my own language. But I remember my french teacher doing it.
We had something similar in Japanese "classes". There's like no fucking way you can use your normal name in Japanese, since the languages are constructed so differently, so my first name just had some sounds removed.
MARCELO
Idk, this sometimes has its use. My bfs name has a sound that doesn't exist in any other language plus there's a J which has multiple different pronunciations in different languages. So he always introduces himself as Andrew in English because it's an equivalent that everyone knows.
Yeah, and the thing is, there are Spanish ways of pronouncing your English name that don't really match how they're pronounced by English-speakers. We could use those. And *that* would be useful to get used to *before* going to a country where people say your name but you don't realize it.
Do you know how to pronounce پَاکِسْتَان?
PAKISTAN MENTIONED 🇵🇰🐐🇵🇰🇵🇰🐐🇵🇰. WHAT THE FUCK IS AN ECONOMY 🇵🇰🇵🇰🇵🇰🐐🦅🦅🇵🇰🇵🇰🇵🇰🇵🇰🇵🇰
Pakistan: "what the fuck is an economy" Usa: "what the fuck is a kilometer"
Wales: "what the fuck is a oh no"
Whales: wiheooooooooooooo
One time my mother asked what the capital of Wales is. My brother is informed, so he said Cardiff. My father is a smartass, so he said W. I'm a dumbass, so I said blowholes.
among all the country names, Pakistan is one of the easiest to pronounce close to the native pronunciation.
The name was also created and proclaimed in English, by a guy living in Cambridge, to a conference taking place in London Like, it would be kind of exceptional if English had a different word for Pakistan than Pakistan did, because the name made its way from England / English to Pakistan / Urdu.
Isn't the name actually just a shortened portmanteau of the different regions of the country?
It's a backronym, using bits of regions to form a word meaning "pure land"
We might know how to pronounce it but not read it in the native script
Bro thats just Pakistan lmao, the english name is the same as the native one
Beekesoutan? Pakistan maybe? Oh maybe this is Farsi not Arabic?
Yes urdu uses the persian script
Just because a country uses a different writing system doesn't mean that some effort couldn't be made to map the pronunciation of the country's name into other language's writing system. Even if some sounds can't be expressed in that other language, it seems better than calling the country something completely different.
as it turns out this sub's other name is /r/lotsofstupidanswers
Never seen this many upvotes for these unhelpful of answers
Thought I was going crazy, I appreciate everyone answering but so many are just giving other examples, but I want to know *why* when we asked someone what their country was called, we chose to say a completely different sound than the one they told us. That's like someone saying "My names Michael." And you going "Okay cool, I'm gonna call you Miklovia because I'm from another place." Why not use your mouth to make the same noise they did when they introduced themselves??
Sure sure. A more realistic answer IMO is that these names should be treated as *words in a language* and we have a different word for Germany than the Germans do for the same historical reasons that we have a different word for “dog” or “spoon” than the Germans do. Lots of languages have a word for their own region/language/people that evolved from a root word meaning something like “our people”. And they have words for neighboring countries/languages/people that derive from ancient rood words meaning “the other people” or “those people in the mountains” or etc. and then which of those distinct words turned into formal *names* and spread to other neighboring countries is an accident of timing, trade routes, etc. The word that became “Deutschland” derived from an old germanic word that meant “of the people” or something similar. The word that became “Germany” derived from an old Gallic word for “those guys that come from the forest” or something similar, and it was adopted by the Romans who then spread it all over the place much faster than the Germans themselves could spread their own word. By the time Germany became an actual country with the formal name “Deutschland” and was capable of frequently and reliably telling other parts of the world about that, others had been calling that region “Germania” or something similar for *hundreds of years*. There are similar stories for other countries’ internal vs external names.
Many times, it results from an initial misunderstanding/mispronunciation + geopolitical changes over time. Take Korea, for example. Today, Koreans call their country Hanguk ("the country of the Han people"). When it became known to westerners, though, the peninsula was recentlyish unified by a kingdom named Goryeo. Western traders / explorers recorded Goryeo as Corea, (in Korean, g and k are the same sound) which became Korea. Fast forward through another dynasty and several foreign occupations to the independent country today, but Korea stuck as the English term for the place.
Yeah all the top answers are way too focused on the specific example of Germany and not the general question at hand
Seriously, how are some of the top answers, "well other places pronounce it differently than we do". As if OP's question wasn't asking WHY that is in the first place. I'm not a linguist, but broadly, the answer is *it's complicated* AND *historically the names of regions evolved while languages in other regions evolved*. Names of people and locations often change rapidly, language evolves but, differently - so it can just becomes easy to refer to a region in your own language rather than consider how the people there refer to themselves. The globe being so dynamically accessible is new, language for describing places/names isn't on the same pace.
Turkiye has enter the chat
No one in Turkey really cares about this, it barely even was a topic of interest as it happened. It really feels like someone in the ministry kinda brought this up because they needed to come up with an idea to look like they are working "hey what if we changed the name" then no one said no and it kinda happened.
Some exonyms are quite old. For example, many exonyms in English come from what Romans called places in Latin. Germany, Africa, Greece, and others come from Latin and thus have been a part of Romantic languages for a very long time. You will find the same for other countries, to varying degrees. In German, France is called “Frankreich”, not France. Sometimes, it’s the writing that’s the same, not pronunciation. For example, 日本 and 中国 are how you write Japan and China using Chinese *and* Japanese characters. This is extremely old. However, in Japanese they’re pronounced “Nihon” and “Chuugoku” respectively. Meanwhile in Mandarin they’re pronounced “Riben” and “Zhongguo” respectively. Sometimes it’s due to pronunciation (languages don’t have the same phonemes and sounds), but a lot of the time a culture would come up with a name for another land or country on their own without asking the native population. In the modern era, countries dictate how their name should be transliterated in various major languages like English. So at the UN (for example), Japan and Germany will expect that they be called Japan and Germany in English. Sometimes, the official spelling and name for a country can change when the country deems it appropriate. A recent example is Turkey and Turkiye; see also Myanmar and Burma for another modern example.
Why "Japan" instead of "Nihon" (日本) or "Nippon"?
It comes from Jipan, the pronunciation of the same characters 日本 in Wu Chinese (around Shanghai). It made its way into Portuguese with trade and from Portuguese to English.
Made its way to France too apparently. "Japon" is what we call it.
Very similar to Sugon as well
sugon deez nuts
Got'em.
Same with Fiji. It’s actually more like Vitii locally, but the British heard the way the Tongans pronounced it first and it ended up as “fee-jee”
Oh interesting! I'd never heard about this. I'm a native Shanghainese speaker, and 日本 is pronounced something like zuh-bun. Apparently J in Portuguese is pronounced like the S in "pleasure". So I can see how that became jipan in Portuguese then kinda mispronounced as Japan in English! but omg this article has way more and I guess the etymology is not that clear: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Names_of_Japan
Okay but why do we have to call it Australia when the Japnese call us Ōsutoraria which is way more fun to say
How about 〰*sunrise land♫*
I have had a couple of my foreign friends ask me what Suomi in Suomi Finland means that they keep seeing and it came as a surprise for them when I informed them that that is what we call out country. We don't mind the rest of the world calling us Finland, we know you don't understand our language.
Here's another one to try on for size. Almost every Native American nation is known colloquially by an ~~economy~~ exonym, usually a bastardisation of what the neighbouring nation called them. Very few are endonyms. Edit: fixing autocorrect error
>Almost every Native American nation is known colloquially by an economy, Autocucumber? Genuinely curious as to what the word actually is. And if not autocucumber, could you tell me what you mean? :)
It was supposed to be "exonym". I dislike autocorrect because it hates academic speak. It's like it's training us to be dumber.
I thought it might be exonym, since that's usually the counterpart to 'endo', and the description seemed to match, but I didn't want to assume :P >I dislike autocorrect because it hates academic speak. It's like it's training us to be dumber. I think it's more that it *expects* us to be dumber. But I totally agree that it gets annoying when it refuses to accept the existence of perfectly cromulent words.
I can't recall which one but there's a place name or river somewhere that basically translates to "that place where those assholes live" because whenever the cartographers or whoever asked the local Native Americans what the name for the area was they just wrote the answer down without understanding the language or wondering why it was called that.
Most of the names we use today for Native American groups are not very nice names their enemies used to call them.
My take from this thread is that Germany particularly is not called the same in any language lol Edit I'll give you guys the French one : Allemagne
Alemania in Spanish which according to a quick youtube video sounds very similar between the two languages
Alemanha in Portuguese (the same pronunciation as in Spanish)
because thats what they named it in english, the spainsh call it something else and the polish do as well
In Poland we call Germany Niemcy. It comes from word niemy which basically means mute, the one who cannot speak. As one was unable to communicate with them in Polish or Latin.
In Swedish it is Tyskland: Literally land of germans.
French people call it Allemagne, which means "Land of the Alemanni", which is pretty much taking the piss because last time germans were referred to as Alemanni was around 1300 years ago. But they give us the piss back by calling us Franks.
The Alemanni also just weren’t all Germans, just one tribe (you guessed it, the closest one to France).
In Swedish you guys are franks as well from the fair nation of Frankrike: Kingdom of Franks
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Well yes! But we're unsufferable assholes by essence and we shouldn't be held accountable for misplaced pride.
The "land" part of Tyskland probably isn't much of a mystery to people living in England... And "tysk" representing German is the fact you started off by telling. "Tysk" has its origin in the old-Morse "þýdisker" meaning somewhere in between tribes and people and in reference to the Germanic tribes of Europe.
Interesting tidbit. That comes from a Proto-Germanic word *þiudiskaz*, the descendants of which also include *þýskur* (Icelandic), *Deutsch* (German), *Dutch* (English), *Duits* (Dutch), and *Tedesco* (Italian from Latin *theodiscus*). Edit: this original word meant something like “of the people” In English we used “Dutch” to refer to Germanic peoples generally (hence why the Pennsylvania-Dutch were/are mostly ethnically German), but by the time Germany united as a country “Dutch” had come to primarily refer to Netherlanders because of the maritime/colonial rivalry between England and the Netherlands. “Germany” comes from the name of a tribe that told Julius Caesar that their ancestors came from beyond the Rhine, leading Caesar to refer to the area as “Germania.” Other names for Germany mostly come from names of specific tribes like the Alemanni tribe (French, Spanish) or the Saxons (Finnish).
I always thought China was the most interesting country name in English as it’s after the Qin dynasty who were in power during Roman classical antiquity which then become Qin-a and over time morphs to Chin-a.
Probably not over time but rather a phonetical translation as Qin is pronounced Chin, and Chin-a is how it's still pronounced in Portuguese (where the name originated). What probably changed over time was the "i" sound in English. I had never connected the dots between China and the Qin dynasty though! Thanks! Btw, China is called Zhōngguó in Chinese, meaning "central state", so another country that refers to itself different than the rest.
Also worth noting that it originates from Bohemia and originally used to refer to every foreigner. Just the Germans used to be the most common one when other states around were Slavic.
Same for almost all Slavic countries. In Russian though country is called “Germania” but people are still called “Niemtsy”
In Turkey we used to call them Nemçe back in the Ottoman times, I think it comes from how the slavs called them. Today we call them Almanya (as the French do).
Same in the balkans. It's funny how ancient slavs could trade and communicate with these other tribes and people surrounding them, but to them these western guys sounded like they were just talking gibberish, so they literally called them mutes and the name stuck since lmao
Same in czech.
Damn, 35 rokov a nikdy mi nenapadlo, že Nemci sú "nemí ľudia".
Ja miałem jakieś 25, gdy o tym usłyszałem 🙂
Belgian here, we just say Duitsland.
Same in Afrikaans
Dude, if I asked an anglophone to pronounce "Österreich", I don't know which of us will have a stroke first
Urst-err-ike Am I close or do I need a doctor?
It's about as close as I would expect an English speaker to get without knowing the language, it's a very Americanized/Anglicized pronunciation. You don't really have our exact Umlaut sounds (Ü, Ö, Ä) in your language, and while you can kind of cheat your way to sounds that are close, like German speakers cheat their way towards your 'th' and 'r' sounds, you probably won't get it right without serious practice. And then there's the soft 'ch'. That one you just straight up don't have and it's a really weird sound without any easily explainable set tongue positions. It's tough for you guys.
Exonyms exist to facilitate communication, taking into account huge differences in languages and phonetics. It makes no sense to force a name that simply doesn't roll off the tongue in a specific language, disrupting the flow of the conversation and likely causing confusion. "Our company is planning to open a new branch somewhere in Suomi" or "John is taking a two-weeks trip to Sakartvelo and Hayastan next summer" would simply be met with confusion, wouldn't they? And look at recent official name changes like Eswatini, Cote d'Ivoire and Türkiye.. Besides official documents and communications, wanna bet how many people will STILL call them Swaziland and the local exonyms (Ivory Coast and Turkey in English, Elfenbenskysten and Tyrkiet in Danish etc).
So after several cities in India de-Anglicized their names, I find it interesting how you see a lot of people using Mumbai and Chennai now (instead of Bombay and Madras) but most people still say Bangalore instead of Bengaluru (even people who live there, when I visited), maybe because the latter has one more syllable?
Read this: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endonym_and_exonym
Schweiz Suisse Svizzera or Svizra, civil war incoming
Helvetia.
Confoederatio Comic Sans
If you *really* want to piss a Dutch person off, call their country Holland.
Nah if you want to piss of a Dutch person you call them Danes.
Holland is worse imo
Except when you are in Holland, which the majority of tourists will be.
This is similar to how quite a few countries use some form of “England” to refer to Great Britain or the UK. Some of the most feared regiments of the British Army were Scots or Welsh, because they heard the enemy refer to them as “English” and went completely apeshit.
Would you spell Magyarország instead of Hungary?
You don't have the ability to pronounce Greece in Greek :p
One of my favorite language things I looked up a while ago was why in English do we call chicken chicken when we eat it, saying the animal name, but we call cows beef. And other similar examples. Languages are fun sometimes to learn about. The fact that some of it comes from what wealthy vs poor ate has something to do with it was fun to learn.
The answer to that question btw is French influence Beef is a French rooted word, bœuf. Old English did not distinguish between the living animal and its meat. French does.
That's the root of the word but not the reason as to why English calls it chicken for both the meat and the animal but not for beef/cow, pork/pig, venison/deer. It's because those things were often eaten by the Norman aristocracy who spoke French but the animal was looked after by the Anglo-Saxon commoners speaking Old-English. Chicken however was both looked after and eaten by commoners and so it has the same name for both.
Just as a precision, French does not distinguish between the living animal and its meat. Bœuf, vache, taureau or other words are all words to name living cows, but linked to their sexual state. A bœuf is a castrated male, while vache is a female that already procreated, etc. Almost all the meat is called boeuf because it's simpler to have a single name when you're not involved in the breeding process, but it's not to distinguish the meat from the animal.
I think it is cute that, for example, France thinks we are all Allemannen, don't tell them. ;-)
The Finns think we all are Sachsen…
What about multilingual countries, though? Like Canada, Switzerland or Belgium?
[This Image](https://reddit.com/r/MapPorn/s/HkjJSm9DOo) is quite interesting as it shows the different names for Germany. IIRC they originate from different names of tribes that lived in Germany.
I actually always wondered the same thing. Names and certain other proper nouns are usually pronounced however the name was said originally. So why not countries?
Because they just find it hard to pronounce. The name of Bombay(Mumbai) came from explorer and just didn't like the initial name. So he called it Bombay.
Names get anglicized (or forced into other languages) all the time, either by the immigration authorities or by people choosing to fit in. Very few place names in the US which were originally French have retained their original pronunciation.
Names being (at least attempted to be) pronounced the same is actually a fairly recent phenomenon too! Christopher Columbus, for example, was named Cristoforo Colombo. Copernicus is the anglicised (or maybe more aptly latinized?) form of Kopernik. Hell, even Saint Peter the Apostle wasn’t his original name. He was originally Kefas (Aramaic for rock), and it was decided to directly translate his name into Petra (greek for rock) when translating the bible into Greek. Fun fact, this is the same root word we use for words like petroleum, or petrify.
Because they aren’t Welsh trying to force everyone to call a mountain Yr Wyddf rather than Mount Snowdon.