escaping germany alone

why is the korean word for germany 독일 dogil?

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deutschland, germany, alemania, niemcy and more

so, the subtitle says it all. the korean word for germany is 독일 dogil. but why? yes, germany has various names in various languages. it's notorious for that, and in english we don't even call it by its native name, deutschland. in french, it's allemagne, and also in spanish & portuguese (alemania, alemanha). in russian, 'germany' is germanija, but 'german' is nemeckij, which is also another completely different name. and all these have their own etymologies:

  • deutsch is from *þiudiskaz, meaning 'of the people'. the germans saw themselves as the common people, and so they named their own country after that. the same word became english dutch, with a slight change of meaning to refer to another country slightly up above on the map.
  • english's own germany is from the germānī (latin), a tribe who inhabited the region.
  • alemania and such are from the name of a confederation of tribes, called the alemannī (or alamannī) in latin, and that name is very probably from *alamanniz, literally all + man (here in the older meaning 'person'), meaning 'all people', because it was a confederation.
  • nemeckij is from nemoj, the russian word for 'mute'. cognates of nemeckij appear in various slavic languages, and in some of them, like in polish, it's even the name for the country (niemcy). the germans were called 'mute' because their language wasn't understandable to the slavs, in a "we speak normal, y'all speak weird!" way.

but what about korean's own dogil? where does it fit in this picture, is it a completely different name? well, i'm here to show you that it isn't.

the deutsch and the dutch

the dutch word for german is duits. you might be asking — what does that have to do with korean? the netherlands is on the literal other side of the world compared to korea. and you would be right about that, but i need to walk you through a little history here.

the netherlands were the second western country to make contact with japan, after portugal. the portuguese first got to japan in 1543, and a half-century later, the dutch followed in making contact with japan — the first dutch ship arrived in japan in 1600. the dutch were kept as the official trading partners of japan for quite a while, because right after they arrived, a policy called sakoku was enacted, which is basically "no one can come in, no one can get out", with very few exceptions. one of these exceptions was the dutch, who were still allowed to trade with the japanese on the island of dejima, a little 9 000 m² (120 × 75 m) artificial island off the coast of nagasaki.

this contact of the dutch with japan allowed japan to gain some knowledge of the technological and scientific revolutions that were happening in europe, and they sometimes gave them a japanese twist. one of my favorite examples of this are wadokeis (和時計 wadokei), literally 'japanese clocks', which were these extremely cool but very complicated contraptions made to tell time in the japanese way (which varied depending on sunrise and sunset). a video by japanese history channel linfamy, how the japanese kept time using water, fire, then metal, is partly about this. give it a watch if this is something that you're interested in!

anyway, with this contact, came words. some not used anymore, but quite a few are used to this day, like the japanese word for 'glass', ガラス garasu. there's also bīru 'beer', retteru 'label', mesu 'surgical knife', buriki 'tinplate', all still used in modern japanese. and one of these words the japanese got from the dutch was the name of germany, a country that was really close to the netherlands, after all. the dutch word for 'german' was duits, and that became ドイツ doitsu, the japanese word for germany. ironically, the japanese name for the netherlands isn't the netherlands' name for itself, nederland, but the portuguese holanda (> オランダ oranda).

🛶🔫 (oar + gun > organ)

so, we've gotten to the japanese doitsu already. and korean dogil comes from japanese, but how do you get dogil from doitsu? you'd expect the korean word to be something like 도이쓰 doisseu or 도이츠 doicheu if it truly was from japanese. but the thing here is, it wasn't the pronunciation of the word doitsu that was borrowed, but its spelling! nowadays, the japanese word is just spelled phonetically as ドイツ, with characters for do, i and tsu, but it used to be spelled 獨逸, with kanji.

note for below: japanese character reforms

most chinese characters in this article will be given in the old spelling for consistency; it's the one that's still used in traditional chinese, and also in korean, when it's written in chinese characters. but be aware that japanese has different character forms nowadays, called 新字体 shinjitai, and that mainland china and singapore have simplified their own chinese characters into what's called "simplified chinese" orthography, or in chinese itself, 简体字 jiǎntǐzì.

the first character (獨 in old spelling; now reformed to 独 — see note) is pronounced doku, but here it stands for do. it means 'alone', as in the word 独身 dokushin 'single (not married)' or 独占 dokusen 'monopoly'. the second one, 逸, means 'escape', and is pronounced itsu. if you join do and itsu, you get a way to spell doitsu. but the characters here, as you may guess, aren't being used for meaning. just like i spelled organ with an oar and a gun in the title of this section, the characters for 'alone' and 'escape' are being purely used for their sound here, not their meaning. chinese, which doesn't have a phonetic script like japanese does, still uses its characters to write foreign words like this to this day; for more, see my article mandarin at the karaoke § 'sand throw'.

this 獨逸 spelling was what entered korean, with no regards for pronunciation. the first character, 獨, is read 독 dok in korean, and the second one, 逸, is read 일 il. the pronunciations are similar to japanese's doku and itsu, but not the same, because both actually come from chinese, but anyway. this distorted the word a little, because it gave it a k sound that was never there — the japanese read the 獨 as do — and also changed the final tsu to an l, giving korean dok-il, or 독일 dogil.

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Pub: 11 Nov 2023 03:11 UTC
Edit: 30 Jan 2024 15:08 UTC
Views: 450