In Medieval Latin and were adjectives used to distinguish Germanic dialects and their speakers, which in practice mainly meant Continental West Germanic languages, or in other words the medieval relatives of modern Dutch and German, including Low German.
was a word borrowed directly from West Germanic itself. Words such as Old High German , and Old Saxon , represented variants of a Proto-Germanic word which meant "of the people", applied to, among other things, vernacular language or people who spoke such a language. It was this meaning which was picked up and used in Latin documents. was an alternative Latin term which gradually became more popular. It was ultimately derived from the name of a second century BC Germanic tribe the Teutones, who fought the Roman Republic. Their name was apparently perceived as reflecting an older classical form of the same Germanic term as .
In Medieval Western Europe Latin was the language of science, church and administration, hence Latin and its Germanic counterparts were used as antonyms of Latin, to refer to the "native language spoken by the general populace". They were subsequently used in the Frankish Empire to denote the native Germanic vernaculars. As such, they were not always used as antonym of Latin, but of walhisk, which was a Germanic term for the Romance languages descended from Latin.M. Philippa e.a. (2003-2009) Etymologisch Woordenboek van het Nederlands [diets]
In the sense of being a word for a type of language, Latin much later became an early equivalent of the modern linguistic concept of Germanic languages, while and its Germanic reflexes resulted in modern terms for specific types of West Germanic, or their speakers, such as the English term "", for the language of the Netherlands and its speakers, the German word for their own language and nationality, the modern Dutch word for "German", , and the obsolete or poetic Dutch words for Dutch and its dialects such as . In Romance languages, forms of the same word yielded the Italian word for "German", , and the old French word used for speakers of Dutch or German dialects, .
Etymology Theodiscus is derived from West Germanic *þiudisk,W. Haubrichs, "Theodiscus, Deutsch und Germanisch - drei Ethnonyme, drei Forschungsbegriffe. Zur Frage der Instrumentalisierung und Wertbesetzung deutscher Sprach- und Volksbezeichnungen." In: H. Beck et al., Zur Geschichte der Gleichung "germanisch-deutsch" (2004), 199-228 from Proto-Germanic . The stem of this word, , meant "people" in Proto-Germanic, and was an adjective-forming suffix, of which is the Modern English cognate with the same meaning. The Proto-Indo-European word ("tribe", "people"), which is commonly reconstructed as the basis of the word, is related to Lithuanian ("nation"), Latvian ("nation"), Old Irish ("tribe", "people") and Oscan touto ("community")., p. 269.
The word existed in Old English as ("speech", "public", 'native"), came into Middle English as ("nation", "people") and was extinct in Early Modern English, although surviving in the English place name Thetford, "public ford". It survives as the Icelandic word for "people, nation", the Norwegian word for "people", "nation", and the word "German" in many languages including German , Dutch , Yiddish , Danish , Norwegian , Swedish and Italian .
From the 9th century the Latin term was often used to translate , and in the 10th and 11th century the term gradually replaced . While morphologically similar, is only distantly related, and originally derived from the name of a Celtic or Germanic tribe, the Teutones, who invaded southern Europe in the second century BC. It came probably via Celtic from Proto-Germanic ("ruler", "leader of the people"), from ("people, tribe"), from Proto-Indo-European ("people", "tribe").
The word , a neologism for a branch of Germanic neopaganism, is based on the Gothic form of the word, where also took on the meaning of "pagan",J. de Vries (1971), Nederlands Etymologisch Woordenboek [diets] a Judeo-Christian calque on similar formations such as "Gentile" from Latin gens ("people") and Hebrew goy, i.e. "belonging to (other) peoples". Proto-Slavic similarly borrowed the word as with the meaning "foreign", giving rise, for example, to modern Polish , Czech , Serbo-Croat and Russian .
The term must not be confounded with theodicy (from Ancient Greek θεός theos, "god" and δίκη dikē, "justice"), which, despite its phonetic resemblance, does not share any etymological origin and refers to an argument in the philosophy of religion that attempts to resolve the question of evil.
Semantic development within medieval Latin
The Latin word first appeared in the late 8th century, when it was used in the Carolingian Empire in various spelling forms, for example already beginning with t, or th, or d. It became more popular in the 9th century and was used in a wide variety of documents, always in the context of language, until about 1050. The meaning of adjective is “vernacular" or "in the vernacular”, but was in practice always used to contrast contemporary European Germanic speakers to Latin and to the Romance vernaculars.
The term was often used in the plural and although Carolingian scholars soon began to realize that this category of languages extended to the ancient Goths, and distant Scandinavians, they did not write as if this necessarily implied that they were all one single people. Haubrichs suggested that this way of thinking and writing began in Northern Italy in the 9th century, where people from north of the Alps were often present, and considered distinct from the more integrated local Lombards.
From the 9th century the Latin term was seen as a classical Roman version of the same concept. For example, already in about 830 the ‘Teutons’ mentioned in Virgil’s Aeneid, were explained as "the people of Germania" and, it was indicated that they spoke . Subsequently, in later centuries came to mean "German". In the 10th and 11th century the term gradually replaced . One reason for the term's popularity was that came to be the name of what historians now call the Kingdom of Germany, the mostly German-speaking core lands of the Holy Roman Empire.
Germania was also a Roman term known to the Carolingians, but it was initially only used geographically. Only in the 9th century is there mention of . In the Heliand text the Heliand, written around 840/850 the is distinguished from being the term used for the Saxon language used for the Heliand.
Semantic development within English Currently, the first known attestation of theodiscus is to be found in a letter written around the year 786 by the Bishop of Ostia. In the letter, the bishop writes to Pope Adrian I about a synod taking place in Corbridge, England; where the decisions were later read aloud elsewhere "tam Latine quam theodisce", meaning "in Latin as well as the vernacular / common tongue".Dümmler, Ernst. Epistolae Karolini Aevi 2, MGH 3 (Berlin: Weidmann, 1895), pp. 20-9 at 28 Rendered in Old English as þēodisc, the term was primarily used as an adjective concerning the language of the laity. It was rarely used as a descriptor of ethnicity or identity, as the Anglo-Saxons referred to themselves as Seaxe, Iutas or Engle, respectively meaning Saxons, Jutes and Angles. The latter term would later give rise to the adjective , which during the Early Middle Ages became the term for all speakers of the Germanic dialects now collectively known as Old English.Farmer, David Hugh (1978). The Oxford Dictionary of Saints. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. .
By the late 14th century, þēodisc had given rise to Middle English duche and its variants, which were used as a blanket term for all the non-Scandinavian Germanic languages spoken on the European mainland. Historical linguists have noted that the medieval "Duche" itself most likely shows an external Middle Dutch influence, in that it shows a voiced alveolar stop rather than the expected voiced dental fricative. This would be a logical result of the Medieval English wool trade, which brought the English in close linguistic contact with the cloth merchants living in the Dutch-speaking cities of Bruges and Ghent, who at the time, referred to their language as dietsc.P.A.F. van Veen en N. van der Sijs (1997), Etymologisch woordenboek: de herkomst van onze woorden, 2e druk, Van Dale Lexicografie, Utrecht/Antwerpen
Its exact meaning is dependent on context, but tends to be vague regardless.H. Kurath: Middle English Dictionary, part 14, University of Michigan Press, 1952, 1346. When concerning language, the word duche could be used as a hypernym for several languages (The North est Contrey which lond spekyn all maner Duche tonge — The North [of Europe] is an area, in which all lands speak all manner of "Dutch" languages) but it could also suggest singular use (In Duche a rudder is a knyght – In "Dutch" a rudder [cf. Dutch: ridder] is a knight) in which case linguistic and/or geographic pointers need to be used to determine or approximate what the author would have meant in modern terms, which can be difficult.H. Kurath: Middle English Dictionary, part 14, University of Michigan Press, 1952, 1345. For example, in his poem Constantyne, the English chronicler John Hardyng (1378–1465) specifically mentions the inhabitants of three Dutch-speaking fiefdoms (Flanders, Guelders and Brabant) as travel companions, but also lists the far more general "Dutchemēne" and "Almains", the latter term having an almost equally broad meaning, though being more restricted in its geographical use; usually referring to people and localities within modern Germany, Switzerland and Austria:
By early 17th century, general use of the word Dutch had become exceedingly rare in Great Britain and it became an exonym specifically tied to the Dutch-speaking inhabitants of the Low Countries. Many factors facilitated this, including close geographic proximity, trade and military conflicts.M. Philippa e.a. (2003-2009) Etymologisch Woordenboek van het Nederlands [Duits]L. Weisgerber, Deutsch als Volksname 1953 Due to the latter, "Dutch" also became pejorative label pinned by English speakers on almost anything they regard as inferior, irregular, or contrary to their own practice. Examples include "Dutch treat" (each person paying for himself), "Dutch courage" (boldness inspired by alcohol), "Dutch wife" (a type of sex doll) and "Double Dutch" (gibberish, nonsense) among others.Rawson, Hugh, Wicked Words, Crown Publishers, 1989.
In the United States, the word "Dutch" remained somewhat ambiguous until the start of the 19th century. Generally, it referred to the Dutch, their language or the Dutch Republic, but it was also used as an informal monniker (for example in the works of James Fenimore Cooper and Washington Irving) for people who would today be considered Germans or German-speaking, most notably the Pennsylvania Dutch. This lingering ambiguity was most likely caused by close proximity to German-speaking immigrants, who referred to themselves or (in the case of the Pennsylvania Dutch) their language as "Deutsch" or "Deitsch".Hughes Oliphant Old: The Reading and Preaching of the Scriptures in the Worship of the Christian Church, Volume 6: The Modern Age. Eerdmans Publishing, 2007, p. 606.Mark L. Louden: Pennsylvania Dutch: The Story of an American Language. JHU Press, 2006, p.2Irwin Richman: The Pennsylvania Dutch Country. Arcadia Publishing, 2004, p.16.The Pennsylvania Dutch Country, by I. Richman, 2004: "Taking the name Pennsylvania Dutch from a corruption of their own word for themselves, "Deutsch," the first German settlers arrived in Pennsylvania in 1683. By the time of the American Revolution, their influence was such that Benjamin Franklin, among others, worried that German would become the commonwealth's official language."Moon Spotlight Pennsylvania Dutch Country, by A. Dubrovsk, 2004.Pennsylvania Dutch Alphabet, by C. Williamson.
Semantic development within Dutch