The US still looking weird by calling Germany “Germany.”
this post was submitted on 14 Jan 2026
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About as weird as calling Nihon "Japan".
Tbf a good chunk of Europe calls it "land of people that can't speak" basically
They're clearly thinking of the Dutch.
They can speak, they just act like they can't in front of foreigners. I am learning "Dutch" and am 100% convinced this whole language is a hoax
Cause they can't!1!
But for real, for those who are curious: the border between Germany and Poland is effectively the border between western and eastern Europe. So to Slav people Germans lived right over there, and yet spoke something incomprehensible; so we called them "mute" (in Poland at least). If I can't understand you you are mute to me, basically. And the word for "Germans" is the same as for "Germany", so we call the country itself mutes 😅
Literally it's more like "non-speakers", though, isn't it? Nie + mowić = Not + to speak.
So, maybe in contemporary Polish the word has been polished to mean "mute", but could be that they were "those damn non-speakers [of our Polish] across that river-thing!"
Well, the "mówić" part is not present, the root of the word is more similar to "niemy", meaning "mute"; the Polish word comes from "non-speaker", as in "not speaking at all". but that's just speculation on my part, I'm no linguist or etymologist 🤷♀️
At least Wiktionary completely agrees with you!
For fun with words:
- Niemcy - polish for Germans
- Niemcy - polish for Germany
- Niemy - polish for mute
- Jadę do Niemiec - "I am riding to Germany"
- Jadę z niemcami - "I am riding with germans"
- Jadę z niemcem - "I am riding with a german"
- Jadę z Niemczech - "I am riding from Germany"
- Jadę z niemym - "I am riding with a mute"
I wonder how confusing these are for people not speaking polish xD
Nemecko
Nemý
Never realized that.
Still better than Rakousko/Rakúsko. Czech and Slovak are the only languages where the word for Austria does not originate from "Österreich" but from Ratgoz, a single proto-Austrian guy's name.
Yeah right? When it hit me I was like hmmm
Du meinst Deutschland.
And what about the Romance languages. They call Germany “Land of the Alemanni”, they called an entire country full of different tribes after a single Germanic tribe that lived near the French/Italian border. It’s like calling the entire country of the Netherlands Amsterdam.
It's like calling the entire country of the Netherlands Holland. Holland(ia?) is part of the Netherlands which gave the name of the country in a bunch of languages.
This is weird, by the way, I just wrote about the exact same thing not too long ago.
I can open your link, but as someone who's Dutch, the way this all works in English is so absurd. Here we call Germany "Duitsland" and they speak "Duits". This is quite similar to what they say themselves, "Deutschland" and "Deutsch". We call our country "Nederland" and our language "Nederlands". This is again similar in German.
Then why is English "Germany", "German" and "Holland"/"The Netherlands" and "Dutch". It's so silly. There are of course historic reasons, but can't we all just collectively change it?
Face it, even the Anglophones know what you speak is simply Drunk German. :P
as someone who’s Dutch, the way this all works in English is so absurd
Yeah but don't you say Japan instead of Nihon/Nippon? Every language does this to a certain extent.
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The weirdest ones are the Finns, calling Germany Saksa.
I'm German and I feel more at home when I'm in Finland than in Sachsen.
Finnish Saksa is a reference to the Saxon tribe from Old Saxon in Northern Germany, not the current Sachsen.
What about the Portuguese! ALEMANHA for Germany
In Grench it’s Allemagne. The Alemanni were a german tribe at the rhine.
In Grench
Is that the Grinch's native language?
No, its the French-Greek hybrid they speak in Freece
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Not any weirder than any other English speaking country.
Or any country really. I'd be curious to see if a chart of languages ranked on how many countries' endonyms are also the same word in that language. But there's definitely no language that doesn't have exonyms.
English speakers call Deutschland Germany, don't give us all the credit here. And it's called that cause the UK hated keeping track of what y'all were calling yourselves, so they chose bigotry instead (a common theme for England). The rest of us usually don't know the history and just have a word with no context as to why it is that way.
For those Americans who don't understand, calling it Germany is like calling First Nation land "Indialand" because "how can anyone keep track of what they call it? It's always changing!"
Actually, it was the Romans who came up with the term "Germani" for the various tribes at the nortthern end of the world. The anglo-saxons being one of them.
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TYSKLAND
Why put that on the US? We just carried on calling it what the English did.
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I constantly mix up sore and sono. 😮💨
For more context: They don't just mean the same thing. One is a pronoun and the other is an adjective. Like the difference between the word THAT in the following sentences: "That which is given" vs "Hand me that."
Just remember that "no" is the particle that indicates possession, so you need to show what it's possessing if you use it.
Sore can be used as a subject or object directly:
それを説明して下さい。
Explain that please.
Compared to:
その話を説明して下さい。
Explain that conversation please.
Using "no" to show possession can be used without indicating the possessed word with regular nouns, but not the kono/sono/ano words.
家のドアは大きい。
The house's door is big.
家のは大きい。
The house's is big.
Thank you for actually talking about the post ;)
I find that when speaking about them in isolation I also have to take a split-second to remember which one is which. But after a bit of practice, when actually forming sentences, you'll develop a feeling for it and using the wrong one will sound wrong to your ears so you won't need to think about it.
It helps me that 'no' marks possession or relation so 'sono' is like a shortening of 'sore no' and that means something more specific comes after.
But both of those examples are pronouns?
I think they were just saying that in both sentences "that" has different meanings.
Maybe clearer:
Sore ha ringo desu - that is an apple
Sono ringo wo kaimasu - I'll buy that apple
(ringo is apple)
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I was screwing around on Duolingo for a while, trying different languages. Happened upon Russian.
After you get through the alien character set and sounds, it was pretty easy, or so I thought.
There are 16 verb classes There is formal and informal dialect Nouns are gendered.
I happen to be Russian, and yeah. Not the language to learn for funsies.
Hey, until I got to grammar, it was great!
Ok but then what about are, ano, aitsu?
This, that, tentacle monster.
I'm expecting the last one to mean "anal"
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