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>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" wh
by 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
- Markoff 5y agoMind explaining what has "cizinec" with all of this? Btw. most of the Slavs are in for big surprise where comes English word "slave" from.
- kgeist 5y agoThe sound change in Czech was something like the following: 1) teud- => t'ud'-, i.e. the diphong -eu- changed to -u- and palatalized -t- 2) t'ud'- => c'üdz'-, another round of palatalization, similar to how Latin -tio came to be pronounced as -tsio (Polish still has "cudzy") 3) c'üdz' => ci(d)z- , sound change ü => i is quite common across languages, for example Greek -y- => -i- As for the meaning, the Proto-Slavic word first meant "(foreign) people" => Czech "foreigner", Russian "stranger"
- Markoff 5y agothat sounds like extreme stretch, any source for this or it's just your theory?
- kgeist 5y agoThere's an academic field called historical linguistics, with a subfield called Slavistics. It's a solid scientific theory which is based on historical data and typology. I may have gotten some details wrong, but it's generally how the sound changes occured according to mainstream academia. This page has some references at the bottom: https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Slavic/%C5%A5u%C4%8F%D1%8C https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Slavic...