But isn’t Dane a noun? I thought the adjective was danish.
Comment on What's the rule for which 'national identity adjective' suffix to use?
leds@feddit.dk 5 months ago
Denmark -> Dane
I guess that actually the other way around, Denmark : Dane’s field/farm(there is a better English word for mark but can’t remember)
meekah@lemmy.world 5 months ago
leds@feddit.dk 5 months ago
Yes you’re right , the Danes are Danish
Etterra@lemmy.world 5 months ago
Danish. Also doubles as the name of a tasty pastry.
Etterra@lemmy.world 5 months ago
Netherlands → Dutch
No wonder Euros say they don’t exist.
gerryflap@feddit.nl 5 months ago
Dutch is such a weird one. We don’t call ourselves “Dutch” in Dutch, we call ourselves “Nederlands”. This would be something like “Netherlandish” in English. We do call Germans “Duits” though, and they call themselves “Deutsch”. Somehow in English German and Dutch got a bit messed up. The reason is probably that during the middle ages we did refer to our language as “Dietsch”, so that probably stayed around.
CoggyMcFee@lemmy.world 5 months ago
It’s because Germany wasn’t a unified place until not that long ago, so different neighbors came up with their own way to refer to them.
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Names_of_Germany
sailingbythelee@lemmy.world 5 months ago
Dutch is the English name for the dominant language of the Netherlands, and in English we often name people after their language. The Netherlands is also called Holland in English, even though Holland is just the most economically-dominant sub-region of the Netherlands, and the location of its main trading ports, rather than the whole country. Which makes sense if you are an English sailor who only knows the Netherlands through its trading ports and has little need to go inland.
gerryflap@feddit.nl 5 months ago
But we also don’t call our language “Dutch”, we call it Nederlands. It’s a relic of an old time, but actually German should be called Dutch and Dutch should be Netherlandish. It’d help a lot with the confusion of young German and Dutch people learning English for the first time haha. Would also resolve the confusion around “Pennsylvanian Dutch” being German.
meekah@lemmy.world 5 months ago
Lol I wasn’t aware of that being a thing, here in Germany we usually only say that Bielefeld (a German city) doesn’t exist.