1.5M ratings
277k ratings

See, that’s what the app is perfect for.

Sounds perfect Wahhhh, I don’t wanna
alphatoronado official-lithuania
obscuro-quutamo:
“ caterjunes:
“ fun story about this post!! this is because germany ~as a unified geopolitical entity~ did not exist until 1870-ish! before that the region was a mass of very small kingdoms. so there was no need for the surrounding...
caterjunes

fun story about this post!! this is because germany ~as a unified geopolitical entity~ did not exist until 1870-ish! before that the region was a mass of very small kingdoms. so there was no need for the surrounding countries (which in general DID exist as unified entities for a lot longer than that) to have a single word for GERMANY

as a result of this, the words for germany in other languages tend to reflect the region of germany they had contact with. french calls germany “allemagne” because the french interacted with the allemannic tribe(s?) first. the english word “germany” comes through latin from the germanic tribes of gaul. finnish “saksa” comes from sachsen, etc. (interestingly, the word “deutsch” seems to come from an old high german word for “people who speak germanic languages,” and is thus probably the best blanket term for germans)

and then there is the ever-contentious “nemecko” and similar words (see also polish and russian). when i took russian i was told that the russian word is very closely related to the term for mute people, and this was because when early russians first came across early germans, they were like “what the fuck are you guys saying?? you obviously just flat-out can’t speak at all” and the name stuck

see also the wikipedia page on this topic

obscuro-quutamo

Actually the word “Deutsch” has a similar etymology like “Teuton” and both of them relate to Lithuanian word “tauta” (nation), Old Irish word “tuath” (tribe, people) and similar archaic Indoeuropean words.

As for the Lithuanian version “Vokietija” there are several versions though none of them is clear. The most popular yet kind of complicated is this one:

Vokietija < vokietis (a German) < vagaudas (vagoth) < bagaudas (bagaudae(fighter))

It is known that in the ancient times the Baltic areal was bigger and nearly reached Jutlandia. Therefore, it is possible that “Vokietija”’s etymology reaches those times.

Source: caterjunes now u kno germany language languages linguistics etymology