German ethnonyms

Mirjana Dedaic dedaicm at georgetown.edu
Thu Dec 11 15:09:56 UTC 2003


Slavic names for Germans come from the root 'nem' (=mute). Germans
were "people who did not speak" (the same language).

Best,

Mirjana Dedaic

----- Original Message -----
From: dcyr at yorku.ca
Date: Thursday, December 11, 2003 9:46 am
Subject: Re: [FUNKNET] German ethnonyms

> Hi John,
>
> Yes there is also Swedish Tyska
> But  we have to consider Tyska, Deutsche and Tedesco as one only
> since they are
> only phonetic adaptations of the same etymon I suppose.
>
> As for why there are many others, to my knowledge each different
> one comes from
> the name of the tribe after which the name was taken. In the
> Antiquity and Early
> Middle Age, there were still al lot of German tribes living
> separate political
> existence. This is only my intuition.
>
> Cheers,
>
> Danielle Cyr
>
>
> Quoting John Myhill <john at research.haifa.ac.il>:
>
> > Does anyone out there have any idea of why there are so many
> > different words meaning `German' in different languages? Aside
> > from English German, there's German Deutsche, Spanish alleman,
> Italian> tedesco, and Russian nemyetski?
> > Also, does anyone know others?
> > Thanks, John Myhill
> > --
> >
>
>
>



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