Why r there 3 names for Holland-related things?

Byllet   Sun Dec 24, 2006 4:00 am GMT
For the country Holland, there is the other name "Netherlands" . The for the language and the people, there is Dutch. All of them are so different. I wonder why is it so. How it came that there are two equivalents for the country. Are there any differences in terms of their frequency in real life use?
The observer   Sun Dec 24, 2006 4:24 am GMT
Hello Byllet,

The country is christened… Netherlands (Kingdom of the Netherlands, to be precise). It is a common mistake to call the country Holland; Holland is the name of *one* part (one provinse out of 12) of the country. But for some reason most of us (me included) tend to call the entire country for Holland, which actually is incorrect.
Lazar   Mon Dec 25, 2006 1:19 am GMT
It's true; we can simplify things a bit, because really it's inaccurate to call the whole country "Holland" - so our 3 different terms can be brought down to 2. (The actual "Holland" is just one region of the country, comprising the provinces of Noord-Holland and Zuid-Holland.)

Now in Dutch, the situation is simple, with the noun being "Nederland" and the adjective being "Nederlands". So basically it's the English use of "Dutch" that's anomalous.

I've read that in earlier centuries, the English word "Dutch" was an ambiguous term that was used to refer to the Netherlands or Germany. (This ambiguity probably arose from the fact that the Dutch and German dialects are rather similar, and from the fact that Germany, at the time, was a mess of little states, so there wasn't one monolithic "Germany" with which to compare the Netherlands.) A prime example of this ambiguity is the fact that the Pennsylvania Dutch are in fact of German origin, not Dutch origin. Nowadays, the cognates of "Dutch" in other languages tend to refer not to the Netherlands, but to Germany - for instance, the Dutch terms "Duits/Duitsland" and German terms "Deutsch/Deutschland".

So if English had gone the way of other languages, we might have had a more regular system:

Netherland (capital: Amsterdam), Netherlandish
Dutchland (capital: Berlin), Dutch
Byllet   Mon Dec 25, 2006 10:17 am GMT
wow, enlightened ! Heaps of thanks to Lazar!
Lazar   Mon Dec 25, 2006 4:47 pm GMT
No problem - I'm glad to help. ;-)
Guest   Mon Dec 25, 2006 11:25 pm GMT
>> Netherland (capital: Amsterdam), Netherlandish <<

Why not call it Netherlandic?
Lazar   Mon Dec 25, 2006 11:55 pm GMT
<<Why not call it Netherlandic?>>

Yes, now that I think about it, that word would be more consistent with other English adjectives like "Icelandic" and "Greenlandic".
Travis   Tue Dec 26, 2006 9:19 am GMT
>>Yes, now that I think about it, that word would be more consistent with other English adjectives like "Icelandic" and "Greenlandic".<<

But don't forget, on the other hand, "Swedish", "Danish", "Spanish", "Finnish", "Polish", "Turkish", though.