(Untitled)

[bofh1459]

There's this girl at my school that I've had a horrible crush on for the past... year. Anyways, her last name is Rácz (she's Hungarian) and I looked it up for meaning, and found some interesting info about Hungarian names for nearby ethnic groups. Here's the list

Comments

[boonleong]

I don't know about Serb and Slovak, but I can contribute one more...

Nemet - German - "Dumb"/"mute" - still used today.

Hurray for political incorrectness!

[bofh1459]

Whoopsie, forgot that one. That's also a Slavic import, cognate to Polish "Niemiec"/Russian "немец", and present in all Slavic languages (afaik). It comes from the fact that the Germans were called as such by the Slavs as they did not speak a Slavic language.

[muckefuck]

There's also Szász "Saxon" from German Sachse.

[jkrissw]

Shades of the Greeks' "barbar"...

[hkitsune]

Tot might come from "todd" in German, which is death, if I remember correctly. It's also possibly related to "tuer" (to kill) in French, which (and I'm no etymologist, so don't take my word for this) might have been borrowed from those pesky Norse invaders.

[muckefuck]

I think you mean Tod, with a long vowel. But why would this be used as a name for Slovaks? (Note: He's not saying that the word means "dead", rather that it is dead; that is, the meaning given is an obsolete one.)

Oh, and tuer descends from Latin tutare. There's no etymological connexion to Tod (or its cognate, English death).

[rosst]

Do they have a similar IE root?

[muckefuck]

They can't. Grimm's Law tells you to expect Latin t to become English th and German d or t (according to Verner's Law).

Germanic *dauþuz stems from PIE *dhoutu-, from the root *dheuə- "to die". This might be the same stem as in PIE *dhuənes-, Latin funus "funeral".

Tutare is derived from the past participle of tueri "take care of" from a PIE root *teu "pay attention to". Grimm's Law gives us Proto-Germanic *þau-, Old English þeaw "usage, custom" which survives as modern thew "sinew, thick muscle". (The Old High German form is Dau, but I don't know that this has any meaning in the modern language.)

[ladysunflow]

Lengyel - Polish - From P.S. *lędo
What's P.S.?

[scriabingirl]

Proto-Slavic, maybe?

[bofh1459]

Yep.

[ekeme_ndiba]

I think Rác for Serb may have something to do with the old Serbian state of Rashka.

[prezzey]

Sváb = Swabic
Horvát(h) = Croatian

Wikipedia sez "tót" is from the same root as "teutonic" and simply means "people", while "szlovák" could be from "slovo" meaning "word" or simply "Slavic".

[bofh1459]

Yeah, but Horvát(h) is directly taken from Croatian verbatim, so that's easy enough to deduce.

btw, what is a Swab? (and I'm not referring to the stick with cotton on it)

[prezzey]

A group of ethnic Germans (Schwaben in German). I have no clue how they are called in English, so I just transcribed it hoping I would get it right. Here is a German portalsite.

[tonique]

The area is apparently called Swabia in English.