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What a disappointing article. All it answers is where the name Germany comes from and what it means (men of the forest or neighbors) and briefly touches on Alem
by irrational 5y ago
What a disappointing article. All it answers is where the name Germany comes from and what it means (men of the forest or neighbors) and briefly touches on Alemania (without explaining its etymology), but has nothing to say about the origin or etymology of Tyskland, Niemcy, or Deutschland. Why even bother writing an article if you are just going to half-ass it?
- bombcar 5y agoBecause SEO is a cancer.
- boringg 5y agoAmen. However people are always going to try and game systems so that they can get in a better position than their competitors. I see no way out sadly.
- mlinksva 5y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Names_of_Germany https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Names_of_Germany seems better :)
- tuukkah 5y agoYeah, we don't call it Germany, we call it Saksa :-) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Names_of_Germany#Names_from_Saxon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Names_of_Germany#Names_from_Sa...
- tzot 5y agoAnother disappointment is giving the definitions of “endonym” and “exonym” and then using them incorrectly in the same paragraph.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- mkrecny 5y agoCame here to say this.
- MikeDelta 5y agoInteresting, I always knew the word exonym as xenonym. It turns out xenonym is a synonym of exonym. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/xenonym https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/xenonym
- tzot 5y agoWell, exo- means “outside” and xeno- means “foreign/alien”, so they both convey the same meaning. In any case, exo- is the opposite of endo- (inside) and auto- (self) could be perceived as the opposite of xeno-, so I would pair the antonyms as: endonym/exonym and autonym/xenonym.
- kgeist 5y ago>but has nothing to say about the origin or etymology of Tyskland, Niemcy The Polish word Niemcy is peculiar: the word "Slavs" literally means "word people" while "Germans" literally means "mute/unintelligable people". I.e. the word originally meant something like "anyone we don't understand" (similar to the Greek word "barbarian" - someone who says bar-bar, some gibberish). Apparently, at some point the most common type of an unintelligable person you'd meet was someone from a Germanic tribe, so the word began to mean "Germanic". A few centuries ago the word still meant "Germanic" in Russian, people used it to refer to the Dutch and Swedes as well. I can guess Germans have been the most common type of a Germanic person in the last few centuries so the word's meaning was narrowed again and now exclusively means "German". Tyskland and Deutschland stem from the same root teud- "people, folk", so it's literally "land of the people". Interestingly, the word was borrowed into Slavic and now means "foreigner, stranger" (Russian "chuzhoy", Czech "cizinec"). In Russian a derivation "chush" also means "gibberish" (we've come a full circle).
- vletal 5y agoThis is exactly why I first skim comments before opening the link itself. Thank you.
- ajsnigrutin 5y agoSame in south slavic languages... "nemci" can be almost literally translated to "mute people", and the country is called "nemačka", "njemačka" or "nemčija", all from the same root - "nem" = "mute"
- drno123 5y agoAnd to add, in some south-slavic languages, German people are also sometimes colloquially called "švabe", based on the region of Germany called Swabia. This is a bit silly, like saying "Texans" for anyone from United States.
- synecdoche 5y agoThat’s what I thought too until I learnt that a sizeable group of German speaking people calling them selves just that lived in Serbia for centuries before being expelled after WW2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Germans_of_Serbia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Germans_of_Serbia
- usr1106 5y agoDisappointig article, but HN readers will contribute a lot of knowledge...
- 0xBABAD00C 5y agoNiemcy = Deaf/Mute (as opposed to Sloviane = Word-people/Speakers) This was the old Slavic distinction between people who they could understand, and people who they couldn't.
- jmpz 5y agoSeriously. As far as I can tell.. they don't actually answer the question "Why do we call Deutschland Germany?"
- kkfx 5y agoFor Alemania == alle magne or "all men"
- bradknowles 5y agoFeli from Germany actually covers this topic well, in her YouTube post at https://youtu.be/1Gyhu03qHTo https://youtu.be/1Gyhu03qHTo -- as you would expect from someone who is German by birth, but speaks English very fluently and has lived in the US for years.