Deutschland or Germany?

One of the gifts the Bosch year has afforded us is the time to have long conversations about random, mundane, and weird topics. We rarely come to grand conclusions and not yet have we solved any major or minor world problems, but talking to each other has always been one of our favorite pastimes.

One of our conversations over the summer centered around why Americans call this country "Germany." That's not what they're calling it over here. And for that matter, why do people groups rarely call nation states by the name the nation has chosen for itself? That's kind of odd and potentially confusing.

Well, I was thumbing through our copy of Rick Steves' Germany 2009 and came across a nice little nugget of knowledge (for that knapsack of facts you're carrying around).

Our English name "Germany" comes from the Latin Germania, the name of one of the "barbarian" tribes. The French and Spanish call it Allemagne and Alemania, respectively, after the Alemanni tribe. Italians call the country Germania, but in Italy the German language is known as tedesco, after another Germanic tribe. Completely confused by all this, the Slavic peoples of Eastern Europe simply throw up their hands and call Germany Německo (Czech), Niemcy (Polish), Németország (Hungarian), or other variations of a word that means "mute." To Germany, their country is Deutschland, a name used for at least 1,200 years. It probably derives from Deutsch- which is what eighth-century folks called the common language that developed in the eastern half of the Frankish empire.

This was an exercise in one of my school books in which I had to correctly identify the German names for European nations and capitols.