The name is absent



ENGLISH NAMES AND MISNOMERS FOR THE GERMANS 35
the first sizable body of German-speaking Europeans came to
America in 1683 and settled in Pennsylvania, they were called
Pennsylvania Dutch as a rule. Most of them had come from the
city of Krefeld in Germany, certainly not from Holland. Down to
our own days the designation Pennsylvania Dutch has perhaps
remained more frequent than Pennsylvania Germans. Similar state-
ments may be made with regard to the many German settlements
in Texas and elsewhere in the United States. Let me give a typical
example for the use of
Dutchman instead of German with reference
to a German national. In the time of the Republic of Texas, a young
German from the Rhineland, who later became the first German
consul in the Lone Star State, relates in his diary how he once
organized a rather original New Year’s Eve frolic in the Mont-
gomery neighborhood near Houston at the successful conclusion of
which his companions called him “a hell of a Dutchman”
(Gustav
Dresel's Houston Journal,
trans, and ed. Max Freund [Austin, Tex-
as, 1954], p. 92).

For the sake of clarification it might be pointed out that in the
German language the name
Deutsche refers to only one nation oi`
people whereas the name
Germanen denotes that race or group of
peoples to which the Germans belong and which also chiefly com-
prises the ancient Goths, the English, the Hollanders, and the
Scandinavians. It is worth noting that the English language does
not possess any corresponding and unobjectionable racial noun at
the present time. There is, however, the racial adjective
Germanic,
obviously a scholarly Anglicization of the German adjective ger-
manisch,
a derivation from the noun Germanen. By the way, this
English adjective
Germanic, which has been used very much
indeed owing to the absence of any English noun with racial mean-
ing, has itself recently produced a new noun, namely
Germanics,
meaning Germanic philology. It is an American creation which I
find listed for the first time in the 1957 issue of Webster’s
International Dictionary. The formation of this new term is in
keeping with such well established terms as
phonetics, linguistics,
semantics,
etc. In my opinion Germanics is a rather fortunate in-
vention and a welcome simplification for Germanic philology. It is
the equivalent of the German term
Germanistik and less clumsy
than
Germanistics, the literal English translation of Germanistik.
The University of Washington and Rice University have already
adopted the expressions “Honors in Germanics” and “Department
of Germanics” respectively in their catalogs. Incidentally, in line
with
Germanics, I venture to coin and recommend the terms



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