• rumschlumpel@feddit.org
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    2 days ago

    If you follow the etymology, Dutchland is just Deutschland, which is how you say Germany in German. Of course, it has been like 500 years since it was reasonable to say that the Netherlanders are just anothers group of Germans like the Bavarians or Saxons.

    • notsosure@sh.itjust.works
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      2 days ago

      That is not a reason they are called Dutch though. According to AI: People from the Netherlands are called Dutch because the term evolved from the Old High German word “diutisc” or Middle English “diets,” meaning “of the people”. In the Middle Ages, this term was used to distinguish the “common people’s” language from more formal languages like Latin. Over time, “Dutch” came to specifically refer to the people and language of the Netherlands, while “Deutsch” remained as the German word for German.

        • notsosure@sh.itjust.works
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          1 day ago

          Notice the number of downvotes I received - PERSONAL RECORD - YES BRING IT ON ! 👍🏽👍🏽👍🏽 Ironically, everybody is doing it, but nobody will admit it 🤭

          • TheRealKuni@piefed.social
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            1 day ago

            everybody is doing it, but nobody will admit it

            This is the kind of thing people tell themselves about all kinds of behaviors to justify those behaviors but it’s usually not the case. We just tend to assume everyone does what we do, it’s a really common cognitive dissonance reduction tool.

            “People say you shouldn’t do X. I do X. I’m not a bad person. Everyone else is also doing X and just pretending they don’t.”

          • Hadriscus@jlai.lu
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            1 day ago

            I don’t think the downvotes you’re getting are from people who themselves use LLMs, that would be quite hypocritical don’t you think ?

            I think this is a case where you ought to look up an encyclopedia. Trusting these LLMs because they look and sound like natural language produced by a person is a mistake.

            • DragonTypeWyvern@midwest.social
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              1 day ago

              I find it correlates to critical thought ability. The less you have, the more you use it.

              In my experience personality doesn’t come into it otherwise.

      • redjard@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        1 day ago

        That info is a mess, and doesn’t really apply to the topic. It’s also misleading.

        The root of the word afaik is found in exactly one word each of the three relevant languages: “deutsch”, “duits”, “dutch”.

        “deutsch” is german and means german.
        “duits” is dutch and means german.
        “dutch” is english and means dutch.

        So if you literally translate “dutch land” using their closest equivalents based on word history into any germanic language, you will obtain “german land” i.e. germany.
        No idea what english was doing here, but every germanic language can agree the word-family of dutch should have it mean german.
        Maybe the netherlands were the only relevant country to england so they just called those particular duitsmen the only duits and then had to replace the original meaning of the word with german when duits was changed.

        Either way, the etymology of the word “þiudiskaz” is definitely not the reason the dutch are called that in english, the reason for that must be in english itself probably in the last 500 years somewhere. It is a uniquely english and relatively modern phenomenon, forming the meme of this post since it neither makes sense nor matches and of the actual nations or native languages involved.

      • huppakee@piefed.social
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        1 day ago

        The English word for the people from the Netherlands (‘Dutch’) and German word for German ('Deutsch) have exactly the same root. Back then the word referred to a much larger group of people. Over time these languages became more distinctly different languages (as opposed to different versions of a similar language) and the English decided to give the German language a new name and not the Dutch.

        Looking back it would have made more sense to continue calling German Dutch because it is more similar to the German word. We use Nederland (Netherland) as name for our country and Nederlands (Netherlandish / Netherlandic) as name for our language.

      • dreugeworst@lemmy.ml
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        1 day ago

        you know, the AI answer is not that bad, but I have to wonder why you didn’t think about it. the peoples who would later become the Dutch and Germans used to refer to themselves using a similar term that meant ‘of the people’ because they saw themselves, collectively, as broadly similar peoples. OP is not wrong that English people use the word Dutch (rather than something like netherlandish) because there wasn’t much distinction made between German and Dutch at the time. That is, when a broader grouping than city or town was thought of at all.