Grice's England -- and why she never left him

Speranza

From Quinion's today "World Wide Words:

"In the same set of reviews, I gave the title of a book as Germany:
Biography of a Language by Ruth H Saunders. That should have been
German: Biography of a Language by Ruth H Sanders. Apologies."

Actually, I had found the original title to be very clever. There's England, and there's English. Etc.

The Italians are especially bad about that. They call "Germany" "Germania" but German is 'tedesco' -- no connection!

I once wrote a book about "German" but that's a lie.

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Allmanic -- is what gives the Romance language (past the Pyrenees) for "German". Very odd. This comes from their ODD idea that they were 'all-man'. French 'allemand'.

Then there's 'tedesco', which is cognate with some word meaning 'folk'. As is "Dutch', or "Deutsch".

"German" must be Latin. In the Romance-past the Pyrenees, 'a german' is like a brother.

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Then there's the lovely sobriquets deviced by Kramer to mention different varieties of "English", "Englander" "Englandian" and the rest of them.

Lord Quirk once wrote about that. "He speaks English; he is from England" was, for him, a non-sequitur. He was born in the Isle of Man!

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