Re: OT language names (Re: Christmas and new year's speeches 2005)

On Tue, 3 Jan 2006 22:07:51 +0100, "Dag T. Hoelseth"
<dhoel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

>
>"Stan Brown" <the_stan_brown@xxxxxxxxxxx> skrev i melding
>news:MPG.1e1dd352d92f37db989db0@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
>> Tue, 27 Dec 2005 21:48:25 +0100 from Dag T. Hoelseth
>> <dhoel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>:
>> > In Norwegian both forms are correct - Luxembourg and Luxemburg, and the
>> > language would be "luxemburgsk"!
>>
>> Is German "tysk" as it is in Danish, and if so, do you know the
>> derivation? I've always wondered about this -- it seems so much more
>> removed from the English equialent ("German") than the other language
>> names that I know.
>
>Bjarne Birkem has been so kind to provide the following information (for
>some reason he didn't manage to reply directly to the ATR message himself,
>so I post it for him):
>
>*****
>According to the reference works I have had access to, the word "tysk"
>originates from Old Norse "thjod" (NB: I have written "th" here to represent
>the letter "thorn", which was used in Old Norse and Old English, and which
>is still used in Icelandic), cf. Old English "theod", meaning "people". As
>an adjective, this would then give something like pre-Old Norse "thjodiskr"
>(in actual recorded Old Norse the word had reached the form "thyskr"),
>pre-Old English "theodisc", Old Saxon "thiudisc", Old High German
>"diutisch", all of them meaning "of the people". According to the Concise
>Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology, this adjective was used to denote
>the language "of the people", i.e. the vernacular, as opposed to Latin. The
>name apparently stuck, and was then used to denote the speakers of the
>vernacular as well as the language itself. Today we find it as Scandinavian
>"tysk", German "deutsch" and English "Dutch" (where, interestingly, the
>English for some reason started using the word to denote the people from the
>Low Countries (the Netherlands) rather than the people from what we know as
>Germany). It was even exported to some non-Germanic languages; the Italian
>word for "German" is "tedesco", which has the same origin. "Teutonic" is
>also derived from the same word.
>
>As for the origins of "German"/"Germanic", it is no wonder that this does
>not resemble "tysk"/"deutsch", since etymologically the two have no
>connection. "German" comes from Latin "Germanus" (possibly derived from a
>Celtic word "gair" meaning "neighbour" - again according to the etymological
>dictionary cited above), which was the word used by the Romans to denote
>their northern neighbours. The same connotations of "closeness" has led to
>the same word being used about family relations, as in French "cousin
>germain", or in the Spanish word for "brother", which is "hermano". (And
>interestingly, while the Italians, as mentioned above, use "tedesco" about
>the German people and their language, the name of the country in Italian is
>"Germania"...)
>
>Besides, there is of course yet another word, totally unrelated to either of
>the two discussed above, which is also used in some languages to denote
>Germany, its people or the language they speak: French "allemand" / Spanish
>"alemán" (as an adjective) or French "Allemagne" / Spanish "Alemania" (as
>the name of the country). I have not had time to search for the origin of
>this word, but I wonder whether it may stem from the name of one particular
>Germanic tribe or group. Perhaps somebody else knows?
>
It comes from "Alemann" (Latin "Alemanni"), one of the two west German
tribal confederations formed in the third century (the other being the
Franks). It means, I think, "all the people", from the same root as
modern German "Mann", English "man". The Alemanni occupied both sides
of the upper Rhine until Clovis annexed their territory to the
Frankish kingdom in 505.

--
Don Aitken
Mail to the From: address is not read.
To email me, substitute "clara.co.uk" for "freeuk.com"
.

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