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- "Finland är ett vackert land."
43 Comments
Tysk is etymologically the same word as "deutsch", so we just call Germany Deutschland, but our variant.
Exactly. Compare it with Italian "Tedesco".
They all come from the Latin word "Theodiscus", which meant "the common people" of what used to be the region of the Teutonic Kingdom in medieval times.
Then every language had their own version of the word:
German: Deutsch
English: Dutch
Dutch: Duits
Yiddish: Daytsh
Swedish: Tysk
Norwegian: Tysk
Danish: Tysk
Icelandic: Þýsk
Spanish: Tudesco
Italian: Tedesco
In Finnish we call Germany "Saksa".
Then again we also call our country "Suomi".
I guess we just like being different.
Yes, although to be clear, it's Latin that borrowed the word and not the other way around. Tysk comes from old Swedish þýðiskr, in turn from Proto-Germanic þiudiskaz. Theodiscus is a latinization of the word somewhere along the way.
2206
Saksa apparently comes from German Sachsen (“Saxony”), which is a region in present-day Germany. The more you know!
- 838
Isn't 'German' the English word for 'Tysk'? Dutch would still be... Dutch (spoken in The Netherlands and Flanders, Belgium).
Although I get that the word 'Dutch' clearly has the same origin as the rest of these words.
In Spanish we say alemán and Alemania, tudesco may be a very very old name, I,ve never heard this name, not even in literature , another word..teutón..is more known.
That's back-to-front though, sjaelsamlaren, as far as Latin is concerned. Theodiscus is a later latinization of the earlier Proto-Germanic word þiudiskaz (þ=th), an adjectival form of þeudō (the people).
I asked a Finnish friend why is it called Finland and he didn't know. Ha.. Now i need to know why it is called "Suomi" in finnish..!!!
I spent 5 minutes carefully reading the comments and giving lingots for people just because they mentioned Finland here or there... And I'm not even Finnish... So nice that Swedish course contributors included a sentence for those who adore Sweden's neighbour. Tack så mycket / kiitos paljon!
Is there ever going to be a Finnish course on Duolingo? Hopefully someday!
What are the plural forms of land? land/landen or länder/länderna? I found both on Wiktionnary, wondering if they're interchangeable...
*Vi vill ha
It's "vill" on its own when you want to do something, "vill ha" when you want to get something.
"Fin" can mean what Matias said, but in the context of a country a better translation would be "pretty". If you've studied French, compare with the difference between "beau" and "joli".
