On Thu, 2007-10-04 at 17:30 +0200, Wildemar Wildenburger wrote: > Sidenote: Its funny that everybody calls the Dutch "Dutch" (when > speaking English), which pretty much is the word "deutsch", which, guess > what, means "German" (cf. Pennsylvania Dutch). That has always baffled > me --- do Dutch people refer to themselves as "Dutch" when speaking > dutch? The term for "Dutch" is "Nederlands" or "Hollands", isn't it?
It is fairly common that people are referred to by others by a different name than what they call themselves in their native language. Germans call themselves Deutsch, Chinese call themselves Zhong-guo-ren (I think), Iroquois call themselves Haudenosaunee, and so on. The reason for this, I'm guessing, is that visitors and/or invaders either didn't bother to ask what the people call themselves, or they misunderstood the answer, or they can't pronounce the answer, or they didn't ask an authoritative source, or a combination of the above. (For example, if you ask my neighbor what my name is, he might say "The guy that doesn't mow his lawn often enough.") Anyway, I believe this thread has gone on far enough off-topic... -- Carsten Haese http://informixdb.sourceforge.net -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
