Re: Big Six Revisited... again :/

BP Jonsson wrote:

> At 21:50 22.6.2000 -0500, Herman Miller wrote:
> >words for "German" and
> >"Germany" are so variable in other languages
>
> For me it feels very odd not to be able to distinguish between the medieval
> and modern Theotisci and the ancient Germani when writing/speaking English.
>
> I coined "Germanian" once, but a native speaker balked at it.
The problem, as I see it, is that there is no real distinction between the
adjectival forms for nationalities, usually, and the inhabitants of the countries.
For that reason, in the case of "Germanian", the word automatically connotes
a nation state of some kind, or some unified notion of Germanic society, which
would be describing people in terms which they themselves would find foreign:
they only had a dozen or so tribes.

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Tom Wier <artabanos@...>
ICQ#: 4315704   AIM: trwier
"Cogito ergo sum, sed credo ergo ero."
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