Re: [conculture] Names of countries and national languages

Hi

In the last episode, (On Sunday 23 September 2007 07:30:03), Benct Philip
Jonsson wrote:
> Benct Philip Jonsson skrev:
>
> Nothing...
>
> Sorry about that one. The d*****d Gmail in the mobile played
> a trick on me!
>
> What I meant to say/ask was that as far as I know it is the
> case for all the national states of Europe that the name of
> the country and the name of the national language are
> derived from the same base. Even where several languages
> share a single standard language, as with English and German
> the language name shares its base with one of the countries
> where it is spoken.
>
> The one real exception I can think of is España--
> castellano, and even there the language is called español
> more often than not, at least outside Spain where the
> sensibilities of speakers of other languages of Spain
> isn't an issue.
>
> Even outside Europe exceptions are rare, except for Africa
> where ethnic boundaries and old colonial boundaries seldom
> coincide. Urdu in Pakistan and Hebrew in Israel are
> transparent special cases.
>
> The only exception I can think of which resembles my Borgonze-
> Rhodray case is Iran--Farsi, where the name of the language
> is derived from the name of a dominant part of the country.
>
> Can anyone think of other pertinent examples?
>
> /BP 8^)>
> --
> Benct Philip Jonsson -- melroch atte melroch dotte se
> ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
>     a shprakh iz a dialekt mit an armey un flot
>                                  (Max Weinreich)
There are a couple of examples if you're not just looking for native names.
Neither of the two English names for the country in which Amsterdam is
located - "The Netherlands" and "Holland" - correspond to the English name of
the language spoken there ("Dutch", which most likely comes from the
word "Deutsch", or German). AFAICR, whilst in French and Spanish the word
for "Netherlands" means "Low Countries" (as does "Netherlands"), the word for
the language is based on "Holland" (holandais/holandés). An old word for
Lithuanian (or is it Latvian?) in English is "Lettish".

Slightly more jocular/informal examples might be the words "Teutonic"
(referring to Germany) in English and "luso" in Spanish, which
means "Portuguese" and comes from the old Roman name of the province,
Lusitania.

Another example where the native name of a language does not correspond with
the native name of the country where it is spoken is Afghanistan, where the
languages spoken are Dari and Pashto. And of course there is India, where the
name for the country in all the European languages I know of is derived
from "Hindi" or "Hindu" (meaning the Hindu language or an Indian person, and
also referring to the Indus River), but where Hindi is not by any means the
language of all of the population, and which uses the official name "Bharat"
for the country. (Note however the expression "Jai Hind", "Long live India".)

Going back a bit in history, the names "England"/"English" are interesting
because although they originate from Engla-land, "the land of the Angles",
most of the people, called collectively Anglo-Saxons, who gave the name to
the country were in fact not Angles but Saxons, and (perhaps because of this)
the most powerful part of the country has almost always tended to be the
South, where the East, West, and South Saxons (who gave their names to the
kingdoms - later counties or duchies - of Essex, Wessex and Sussex) settled.
There also used to be a county of  "Middlesex", which you will still
sometimes see on postal addresses (most often as "Middx"), but whose
existence as an Anglo-Saxon kingdom is disputed. AFAIK there was never
any "Norsex" or Kingdom of the North Saxons, though there are Norfolk
(North-folk) and Suffolk (South Folk), old divisions of the East Anglian
kingdom which became counties.

And of course there are the names "Wales" and "Welsh", which come from an old
Anglo-Saxon word for "foreigner" and are rejected by the inhabitants of that
country in favour of the terms "Cymri" /kumri/ and "cymraeg" /cumrEg/. Also
in that category are the reflexes of "Gaelic", used primarily in English for
the Scots Gaelic language but which also refers, in its native tongue, to
Irish, a language for which the English term was formerly "Erse".

Finally, who could forget "(lingua) latina" "Latin (language)", named after
the region of which Ancient Rome was a part, and "Senatus Populusque
Romanus", "Pax Romana" etc. Rome of course later gave its name to the Holy
Roman Empire (which one famous wag described as "neither holy, nor Roman, nor
an empire"), Romania/Rumania, and the Byzantine Empire, which was known
as "Kingdom of the Romans" (and its habitants as "Romans") in their native
language, Greek and, IIRC, also in Arabic.

HTH

Jeff
--
"Please understand that there are small
European principalities devoted to debating
Tcl vs. Perl as a tourist attraction."

                            -- Cameron Laird

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