39 Comments
If you don't know where Germany is you should really have paid more attention in Geography classes.
We don't learn about random countries in geography now instead we learn coastal management and other boring stuff :(.
You mean, it has become a bigger country since back then?
"Believe me, dear, I can cheat through any exam " -- that guy probably, 10 years ago.
Just because. The word «не́мец» came up as the term for a foreigner (cf. немо́й "mute"). Eventually it stuck as the word for a German. You see, a few centuries ago Germans were quite common foreigners in Russia (the first ever textbook on spoken Russian was written about 400 years ago by a German).
Did not affect the name of the country that, far as I know, formed much later.
@Shady: No that's not true, don't lie to people here hah :-) .
It's way older than that , i.e from times when all of us Slavs were one big tribe.
"Slavic" , in the the old slavic means "Speakers" (from the word "Slovo" which in the old Slavic used to mean "Speech") , while the "Немецки" , i.e. "the mute ones" were the foreigners.
It stucked to the Germanic tribes because we were basically surrounded by them and lived next to them for a pretty long time ;-)
We started together from India, and we traveled along with the Germanic tribes and along the way we became separate peoples from them, with different languages, but they were still the only foreigners we knew of, hence the name "The Muties" :-)
The same way The Old Greeks had the term for them , the "Helenic", and the "Barbarians" were everyone else, because they were speaking "Bra bra bra" to them :-)
The word has old roots. Its meaning "a German", however, does not. If you mean that нѣмецъ or its precursor was used to mean exclusively Germans a thousand or several thousand years ago, I would like to see some sources.
Note also that Germans were not an ethnicity millenia ago.
As I've said, it did not use to refer only the modern day Germans alone back then, instead we used to call that way all of the Germanic folks, it just stuck to Germans over time.
Serbs,and all other Southern Slavs even call Germany, the country , "Немачка"
Slovo used to mean the speech, hence all of us Slavs = Speakers . Other guys, our neighbours were "mute" hence the "muties" :-)
Nemci / Niemci / Nimcy / Њемци , or whichever version you prefer is very common in all of the Slavic peoples, and it can't be just because the most common foreigners in Russia were Germans right?
In polish language there is also "Niemcy" and "niemiecki język" without any "german" words
@dempl (we start together from india) do you mean your ancestor is from India?? I thougt it was Persia right??
A long time ago, all European-Asian (I hope that's the correct word, the German one is "eurasisch") tribes were close enough to each other to call their language Indo-Germanic. That's why dempl wrote that we started together from India. There were many different languages, which are today summarized as "Indo-Germanic languages". Part of that are all historic language stages before today's Roman, Germanic and Slavic languages and Persian, as well as some Indian languages (afaik there are about two hundred different Indian languages, so I'm not sure if each of them is part of the Indo-Germanic family).
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He's wrong. The Proto Indo-Europeans are the group he is referring to which spoke parent language of the language families which in the modern day include Romance, Celtic, Germanic, Slavic, Baltic, Hellenic(Greek), Albanian, Armenian, Iranic, Indo-Aryan(such as Sanskrit and many other languages of the Indian subcontinent), along with extinct language families such as Tocharian(spoken in western China) and Hittite(spoken in anatolia aka Turkey). The Proto Indo-European homeland based on genetic analysis and archaeology was located in what is now Ukraine/southern Russia between the Black and Caspian seas. The horse and chariot riding sword wielding PIEs spread their languages and genes from Iceland and Portugal to India and beyond.
What I learned in my European history classes and reading elsewhere is that Germans and Slavs are different people groups, the former having descended from Scandinavians. However there is/was the theory that Swedish explorers founded Kiev and thus may be ancestors to the Slavic groups...don't know how much truth there is to that.
The thing is, Germanic and Slavic tribes have co-existed for a very long time and today many Germans have more Slavic ancestors than Germanic, since they also had mixed partnerships.
From what I was just reading, Немецкий is an ethnonym, not a demonym. Russian more strongly differentiates between the two than most languages, probably because they've never inhabited an ethnostate without other people also being there. Being Немецкий doesn't mean you live in Germany, or that you've even ever been to Germany. It means you're "German". By descent, or by race, or by ethnic group, however you care to phrase it.
sometimes I like to just go full idiot-mode and read the cyrillic letters as the latin letters they most resemble. "Rae Repmahnr?" (maaan this can't be healthy for my russian)
Good that the Russians still think about the Germans since they made Hitler commit suicide.
Because it has grammatical cases just like any other noun.
Nouns that end in -ия have и, not е as their prepositional ending:
- мама → о маме, земля → о земле
- Мария → о Марии, Германия → о Германии.
В and НА take the Prepositional case when you mean location (when you mean the direction of motion or action, they take the Accusative).
You mean 1941. You're probably right with 1841 but it's the Russian Empire asking if Germany even exists!
I wish duolingo could help with spelling. I cant spell Германия for my life
The school of the person that asked this question must have used Common Core.
shady_arc explained it above (I hope it's okay that I copy the answer):
Because it has grammatical cases just like any other noun.
Nouns that end in -ия have и, not е as their prepositional ending:
мама → о маме, земля → о земле Мария → о Марии, Германия → о Германии. В and НА take the Prepositional case when you mean location (when you mean the direction of motion or action, they take the Accusative).
