34
RICE UNIVERSITY STUDIES
lively intercourse of rivalry and enmity with those of the Dutch
who were their closest neighbors, i.e., the Netherlanders, and thus
for them the name Dutch gradually came to mean N Ctherlanders
more or less exclusively. When the Netherlanders became indepen-
dent in the 17th century, they raised their particular Low German
dialect, Low Franconian, to the dignity of their national language.
They referred to it and themselves as Netherlandish or Hollandish
while they continued to refer to the remaining inhabitants of the
German Empire, which they had left, as Dutch. The English (who
had in the meanwhile adopted another name for the latter) as well
as the Anglo-Americans have continued down to the present to call
the Netherlanders Dutch, and the Netherlanders do not like it at all,
as would appear from the following telling account :
An American of Hollandish ancestry who had felt maligned by
the application to Hollanders of such expressions as “hardheaded
Dutchman” and “Dutch treat,” wrote a letter to the Houston Chron-
icle which appeared in the issue of March 9, 1960, and included the
following: “We Hollanders are insulted. . . . People whose ances-
tors came from the Netherlands, don’t like being called Dutchmen
because it’s really the Germans who are Dutch, not us. In fact, the
word is ‘Duits’ meaning German.”
Is it not time to do something about the confusion of these names
in the English language?
Il
In their search for a substitute for the name Dutch with which
to refer to the people living to the south and east of the Netherlands,
the English had somehow or other hit upon a name of mysterious
origin and controversial meaning, namely the very name German.
Julius Caesar in his De Bello Gallico and Tacitus in his Germania
had been among the very first to use the name Germani and
had applied it to a group of tribes occupying the left bank of the
Rhine, and chiefly the neighborhood of the old city of Aachen.
William Shakespeare was among the very first to use the new
name in the English language. In his Merry Wives of Windsor
(Act 4, sc. 5) he mentions “three German devils, three Doctor
Faustuses.”
The adoption of the name German by the English and the
Anglo-Americans was, however, by no means universal, let alone
exclusive. More particularly, in America the old name Dutch has
persisted beside German, especially in popular speech. When