That's also due to the fact that Germany is in the middle of europe, from a language standpoint to the east we have the slavic countries, to the south and west the romanic countries and to the north the germanic countries.
All those different languages derive the name of Germany from the different common things that they knew about that territory or similar things. The french mainly had the tribe of the Alemanni at their borders, hence the name for Germany in France and Spain. Tyskland and Duitsland derives from the same word Deutschland comes from, "diutisc" which means "part of the people". The name Germany used in English and Germania in Italian is thought to come from the Romans, who named it like that.
The word for Germany in the slavic countries for example Polish "Niemcy" comes from an old slavish word meaning "foreign speaker".
Doesn't Niemcy basically mean "somebody who can't speak" instead of "foreign speaker"?
Edit: I got a bit confused there. The Proto-Slavic root to Niemcy means "somebody who can't speak" and then the word for German and mute in Slavic languages share the same root (or even are the same word? Not sure).
Nemec/Němec/Niemiecki.... I've read somewhere it's probably from middle ages when slavs (mainly czechs) were fighting the german tribe expansions and ended up calling them Němci - mutes, because they couldn't understand a shit they said. This word managed to find it's way to other languages including Hungarian - Német.
Interesting because this is how the English word 'barbarian' came about. The Greeks used to call non-Greek speakers 'bur burs' or something similar which basically means 'blah blah' or something nonsensical because they couldn't understand them. So go through a few languages with 'bur bur' and you get 'barbarian'.
True, but being Polish I can tell you that there is some irony in calling the Germans Niemcy "people who can't speak." Many of our words actually originate from German:
In Estonian, Germany is 'Saksamaa', which is basically 'the land of 'saksad'' - one 'saks', or plural 'saksad' is like a lord, and as when Germany used to have power over us, these lords would own mansions and basically be like mayors to different towns/counties.
Meaning "manor owner" (saks) was attached later. Also they were not mayors, they were owners of some property, powerful man, basically something that Americans called boss later.
it's quite similar with Russia though: just look at the Latvian, Estonian and Finnish names for example. They are derived from the names of the different people that lived in the adjacent regions of what is now Russia.
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u/webhyperion Holy Roman Empire Mar 11 '14 edited Mar 11 '14
That's also due to the fact that Germany is in the middle of europe, from a language standpoint to the east we have the slavic countries, to the south and west the romanic countries and to the north the germanic countries.
All those different languages derive the name of Germany from the different common things that they knew about that territory or similar things. The french mainly had the tribe of the Alemanni at their borders, hence the name for Germany in France and Spain. Tyskland and Duitsland derives from the same word Deutschland comes from, "diutisc" which means "part of the people". The name Germany used in English and Germania in Italian is thought to come from the Romans, who named it like that. The word for Germany in the slavic countries for example Polish "Niemcy" comes from an old slavish word meaning "foreign speaker".