Quote Originally Posted by MarcusAureliusAntoninus
Weren't the Alemanni just one Germanic tribe?
Btw, what is up with naming Germany? Nobody seems to have the same name for it. I think everyone should just call it "Deutschland", I've never understood why English uses the Roman name for the general area.
A federation, methinks. There were a lot of those over the years, and certainly if I was a chieftain who was about to go pick a fight with the damn Roman Empire I'd try to get some of my peers into it as well !

And for the record, the Swedes call it Tyskland. No idea why. We finns call it Saksa, probably because our main overseas connections there were with the region of Saxony or something. I know Hanseatic League traders were often called kauppasaksi (roughly, "Saxon merchant") back in the day. It may stem for some rather obscure word for some kind of profession or somesuch as well though, as AFAIK does our word for Sweden Ruotsi (either from dhruots, a term for the crew of some common type of ship in the fashion of the old Saxon keel, or some geographical locale) - which I've also seen suggested as the root for the word rus and hence Russia. Which we, in turn, call Venäjä - which is apparently derived from archaic Finnish terms concerning the netherworld and thereafter, ie. realms beyond a (imaginary) border, as well as the related word for a dead person vainaja (ie. someone who has "crossed the border")...

But really, the etymology of place-names is an academic field by itself. I've no idea where the name Suomi, Finnish for Finland, comes from for example, although looking at it I wouldn't be surprised if it had some distant connections with Sámi, the Lapps, whose distant ancestors our distant ancestors displaced to the north a bazillion years ago (as in "Stone Age")...

Head hurts.