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- "Где Германия?"
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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 :(.
"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
That's not true. "Немец, немцы" came from the name of a Germanic tribe which was known as Nemetes (Nemeti). Their capital, Noviomagus Nemeton (or Civitas Nemetum), was close to the site of medieval Speyer, Wiki says.
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
Can anyone explain why sometimes its Германии and other times Германия? My biggest annoyance with Duolingo is that it never tells you why you're wrong, just that you are
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).
