when we need to make a word referring to a country, we use latin roots to form it (china -> sino, england -> anglo, russia -> russo, france -> franco). thus we have sinophiles and anglophiles, the russo-japanese war, sinicization, etc. but what about germany? you cant well call a person fearful of germany germophobic, becasue that word is reserved for those people fearful of germs. so what latin root do you use for germany? and what are some other latin roots for countries?
"Sino-" is just a romanization of "china," since Latin doesn't have the CH sound. "China" is not the Chinese name for the country anyway. They call it Zhong Guo, the "middle nation," i.e., the center of the world. Europeans named it "China" after the Chin dynasty, which was in power more or less during the era when they became acquainted with the country. The three German tribes that overran Britannia when the Roman Empire collapsed, displacing the original Celtic people, were the Angles, Saxons and Jutes. It is our language in which the name "Angle Land" underwent phonetic modification. The Latin form is more authentic. Those are the same root, so I don't quite grasp your point. In Russian the people are called rus, the country is Rossiya, with the accent on the I, and the language is russkiy. Again, these are the same root. The original German tribe that migrated into that region during the Roman era called themselves the Franks and the Germans still call the country Frankenreich. When the Romans conquered Gaul and the Franks adopted Latin, it was they who softened the K into a C in what became the French language, and began calling the place France. Once again, the Latin form is more authentic. Germany is in fact the Latin name. They call themselves deutsch and the country Deutschland. It's from the proto-Germanic word thiudisk, the adjectival form of thiuda, which simply means "the people." It's not clear why the Romans called these Thiudisk people "Germani." It's an adjective from the word for "seed," and may have implied "kindred tribes" or "authentic Celts." (When in fact the Germans and Celts are two distinct groups of tribes but the Romans didn't understand that). "Greece" is also a Latin word. They call the place "Hellas" and themselves "Helleniki." Until quite recently we all called the Czechs Bohemians and their country Bohemia. The Romans named the place after the Bohumil, the Celtic tribe who lived there until around 500CE, when the Slavic people migrated in from the east.
