ENGLISH NAMES AND MISNOMERS FOR THE
GERMANS: DUTCH, GERMAN, TEUTON
by Max Freund
This investigation will be dealing with far-reaching questions of
nomenclature on a historical and philological basis.
Deutsch is what the Germans call themselves in their national
language. Unlike most other adjectives denoting nationality, such
as English and French, the word deutsch is not based on the name
of any tribe. In fact, its origin is quite unique and unparalleled. It
occurs for the first time in the fourth century a.d. as the equiva-
lent of the Greek word ethnilcos in the Gothic translation of the
Bible by Bishop Wulfila. There the word thiudisko is used with the
meaning heathenish and in contrast to Jewish. It is derived from
the Gothic noun thiuda meaning people, which, in its turn, is
supposed to be related to Latin tota, meaning whole, and to go
back to an Aryan stem *teut, meaning people. It took four
hundred years for our word to reappear frequently, but then in
the Latinized form theodisc-, used with reference to language and
in contrast to the Latin word latine. Its successive meanings now
were vulgar, Germanic, and German. Continuing via Old High
German diutisk, we are ultimately led to the modern German word
form deutsch.
I
The word Dutch is the Anglicization of the word deutsch, i.e.,
the result of its adaptation in pronunciation and spelling to the
English language. Dutch is what the English have called (though
not consistently) the German-speaking inhabitants of the old Ger-
man Empire, founded by Charles the Great, during the one thousand
years of its existence, as well as their descendants down to the
present day.
From the 15th to the 17th century the English were in constant
Editor’s Note: Mr. Freund is Professor Emeritus of Germanics at Rice Uni-
versity. This paper is an abridged and updated version of an address
delivered in 1940 before the South Central Modern Language Association.
33