basque/Basque/bask

[Mark A Mandel]

On Wed, 17 Apr 2002, FRITZ JUENGLING wrote:

##        Basque with back vowel sounds somewhat affected/
##hypercorrect to me, an attempt at hispanization to be more correct,
##when the truly politically correct term would be Euskera.
#
#But incomprehensible to most people. Shall we also speak, in English, of
#Nihongo, Magya'r, Franc,ais, and Espan~ol?
#
#Add 'Deutsch' and 'Nederlands' to the list.

We could go on and on, but I thought four was enough to make the point.

#        Of course, the cognates
#of 'Dutch' in both Dutch and German mean 'German', not 'Dutch'. I have
#been interested in the phenomenon of names of peoples in other
#languages being significantly different from what they call
#themselves.  Some words are easily explained, such as 'Dutch,' but how
#about 'German'?  Why didn't English stick with 'Dutch'?  Also, why
#'Finnish'?

Literally 'fen-land', the marshy country.

#       Also, would it be more sensitive in today's climate to
#switch to the native term?  After all, shouldn't we call people what
#they want to be called (just as someone on the list recently wrote
#that we should say Ms. if a lady wants that).  For example, when I was
#a kid, we spoke about the 'Sioux' and 'Eskimo'.  I rarely hear Sioux
#anymore, hearing now Lakota or Dakota and Inuit (although my Eskimo
#acquaintance prefers Eskimo, not Inuit.  So, if for some, why not for
#all? Fritz

Although I have heard (fiercely!) differing reports about, hm,
Amerindian attitudes to "Indian" and "Native American". So what do you
do when the supposedly authoritative referent peoples can't agree among
themselves?

-- Mark A. Mandel