Re: "The Day The Earth Stood Still"

Am Dienstag000003, 03.06.2025 um 00:49 schrieb William Hyde:
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The English name you after one group mentioned by the Romans, the French after another, but the actual descendants of the Romans at least make a stab at the right name.
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The Irish use the same group as the English, but the Welsh follow the French model, as do the Spanish.
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You have the same situation as Greece, which foreigners have been misnaming since 500 BC.  And of course there are more such examples.
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 > But the British
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Not all the British, see above.
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  used 'German' instead of 'Dutch' because 'Dutch' was
 > already in use for the language of the Netherlands.
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I wish I could believe they were  that rational, but I doubt it.
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I can find no Anglo-Saxon word for "Germany".  They had words for various tribes, for the Franks and the Burgundians, and "Denmark" was a word, but no word for the lands where German speaking people lived. Perhaps they just called it "the old country".

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There was no country at that time, where all German speakers lived.
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German was actually a language, which was spoken in many areas of Europe and possibly beyond.
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Modern Germany was founded in 1871 and was created by fusing together about 1000 different mainly tiny entities.
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Prior to that year there was no Germany and certainly also not at the times of the Anglo-Saxons.

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 > So, the Anglo-Saxons had no need to name a country, which didn't exist.
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  Actually the "Kingdom of Germany" dates from the breakup of Charlemagne's empire, formed in the Treaty of Verdun in 843.  It was later absorbed into the Holy Roman Empire, which was later renamed (circa 1500) "The Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation". Which I presume is why the 1871 state was the second empire.

https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regnum_Teutonicum
The 'Regnum Teutonicum' was obviously named after the Teutons.
This was a people who lived in the norther region of Denmark and do not belong to the set of people, which build the population of present day Germany.
Actually all the tribes, which were called 'Germanes' by the Romans, stem from the regions, which belonged to Denmark.

Naturally, the word used for "German" in the above varies from place to place - wikipedia is helpful here, giving:
 "The Kingdom of Germany or German Kingdom (Latin: regnum Teutonicorum 'kingdom of the Germans', regnum Teutonicum 'German kingdom',[1] regnum Alamanie "kingdom of Germany",[2] German: Deutsches Königreich)"
 so the Anglo-Saxons really did need a name, and they went with Caesar's version.

'Angeln' is the name of a region in the north of Schleswig Holstein, which was a part of Denmark, too. That was the region, were the Anglo-Saxons came from.
The German state 'Sachsen' is in no way related to Saxons, because 'Sax' was the name of an ancient weapon (kind of ax).
These Anglo-Saxons  settled also in 'Niedersachsen', but most likely didn't speak German or called themselves 'Germanes'.
So, why should they call their kingdom 'Germany'?

French took the 'Alemanes', which were a people or tribe, which possibly stem from the south-west of Europe and settled in the south- west of Germany.
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Romans used a general term (like in many other cases), and called all the people from the North of the limes 'Germanes'.
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This word was, of course, not used by the 'Germanes', who also didn't call their country 'Germany' (which, btw, hadn't existed at that time).
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So by the time the English felt the need for a word describing the area, they probably just went with the Latin, the more so as most literate people at the time were in the church.

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English is (in my opinion) actually closer related to Latin than current Italian.

 "This is not true".
 "I do not believe this"
 "This is not the case".
 Only the  third of these remarks has a word arising from Latin.

I have learned two languages in school (English and Latin), but tried to learn a few more.
Among this was actually Italian.
To my great surprise, the knowledge of Latin didn't make it easier to learn Italian.
Instead I could see more similarities in the English language to Latin (for whatever reason).
Possibly the Romans went to England and lived there for some time (after the destruction of Rome).
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TH