The Russians call Germans “nemtsy” or “the mute ones” because allegedly the Germans were the first ethnic group the Russians encountered who didn’t speak their language and so they assumed they couldn’t speak at all. The sausage sounds delicious, though, so maybe they just weren’t speaking because they were eating cheese-stuffed bacon-wrapped sausages.
That anecdote doesn’t make any sense though. Like who are “the Russians” and why didn’t they have prior knowledge of other ethnic groups before? And “the Germans” is a very recent group of people that isn’t ethnic at all.
By “Germans” I mean “the early Germanic peoples who occupied the region that became Germany” and “Russians” I mean “the early Slavic peoples who occupied the region that became Ukraine”. I kinda just assumed folks would understand the modern federal German state didn’t exist when early Slavs first encountered other ethnic groups and could work backwards from there.
To expand a bit, it comes from a Proto-Slavic word which was used for foreigners in general, but mostly to refer to Germans. It’s also why most (all?) Slavic languages have basically the same word for German(s)/Germany, similar-sounding to the modern Russian one.
The Russians call Germans “nemtsy” or “the mute ones” because allegedly the Germans were the first ethnic group the Russians encountered who didn’t speak their language and so they assumed they couldn’t speak at all. The sausage sounds delicious, though, so maybe they just weren’t speaking because they were eating cheese-stuffed bacon-wrapped sausages.
That anecdote doesn’t make any sense though. Like who are “the Russians” and why didn’t they have prior knowledge of other ethnic groups before? And “the Germans” is a very recent group of people that isn’t ethnic at all.
By “Germans” I mean “the early Germanic peoples who occupied the region that became Germany” and “Russians” I mean “the early Slavic peoples who occupied the region that became Ukraine”. I kinda just assumed folks would understand the modern federal German state didn’t exist when early Slavs first encountered other ethnic groups and could work backwards from there.
To expand a bit, it comes from a Proto-Slavic word which was used for foreigners in general, but mostly to refer to Germans. It’s also why most (all?) Slavic languages have basically the same word for German(s)/Germany, similar-sounding to the modern Russian one.