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The Origin of EVERY European Country's Name | Americans React

Greg and Lisa React

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🎥 Americans React – The Origin of Every European Country's Name

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Channel: ‪@RobWords‬
Video: The origin of every European country's name

In today’s video, we dive into the curious and often surprising stories behind how European countries got their names. Why does Germany have so many different names? What does Croatia have to do with neckties? And which country is literally the "land of the rabbits"? This one was packed with fun facts we never expected — and it had us pausing every 30 seconds to say, “Wait, what?!”

We love a good rabbit hole, and this video gave us the full tour of Europe, one country name at a time.

We are two Spain-based Americans learning about the world, one surprising video at a time. Whether it’s culture shock, world perspectives, or U.S. reality checks… we’re here to discover what we didn’t know we didn’t know.
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20 Comments

@grzegorzach3891 1 year ago (edited)

The story of Poland is really cut short here — while the name comes from one of the slavic tribes "Polanie"/"Polans" the name of the tribe itself comes from the word "pole" meaning 'field'. So in short:
Poland = the land of the people of the fields

In some languages (Persian, Turkish, Hungarian) the name of Poland comes from one of the other tribes "Lechici"/"Lechites" (named after Lech) which united with "Polanie" and other tribes to form a joined state.

@shades2.183 1 year ago (edited)

Denmark is Spelled with an A in Scandinavian. Danmark, the folk were called Daner (Danes). In old Norse, the Dani lived in Dania.

@MLWitteman 1 year ago

The Netherlands(Modern day Netherlands, Belgium & Luxembourg), used to be part of the Holy Roman Empire. This was a huge realm that was founded by Charlemagne during the early Middle Ages. But emperor Charles V abdicated, and left his realm to his son & his brother. His brother became the new emperor, and got to rule the German lands & Italy. But his son became the king of Spain, and he inherited the Netherlands. The Dutch however weren’t that happy with their new king, and they revolted. This lead to the Dutch war of independence, known as the 80 years war. In the end, Spain only ruled the Netherlands for about 25 years. The only Spanish people that visited or lived in the Netherlands, were government officials, soldiers & merchants. That’s why you can hardly find anything remotely related to Spain in the Netherlands. Except when you listen to our national anthem. But that song is about our struggle for independence.

@ChiaraVet 1 year ago

14:29 Okay, a clarification here. Yes, Servus means serf or slave in Latin, BUT during the spread of christian religion in the Roman empire and later in medieval times and so on, in many regions in Italy and Southern Germany (especially Bavaria), people used to greet each other by saying "Servus (Christi)", serf of Christ, which has a positive connotation and not a negative one, of course. With time, people skipped the Christ part and it´s considered generally a greeting among friends, not something you say to a stranger (unless you are in Munich, some shop owners use the word more liberally).
In Venice, it later became a non religious form of respect and deference to greet someone by saying "Servo suo/a, sior(a) mio/a", literally "I´m your serf, my lord/my lady".

@Draktand01 1 year ago

Sweoland is not actually that inaccurate name for Sweden.

In fact, Sweden (Sverige) is divided into three regions: Götaland, Svealand, and Norrland.

When Götaland and Svealand united, they opted to name the kingdom after the people of the Svealand region for political convenience.

Of course, nowadays people from every region of Sweden are called Swedes, but that wasn’t always the case.

The Swedish national identity is something that emerged over time due to living in the same country, but before unification, different regions had very distinct tribal and local identities, and only the people of Svealand were Swedes.

@heroiam4067 1 year ago (edited)

The italian word “Ciao” comes from “Schiavo”meaning slave.

The way the word became a way of greeting people comes from medieval times where villagers used to salute their lords and landlords with “tuo schiavo” ( your slave), progressively shrinking to just “schiavo” and then ‘sciao’ and finally “ciao” and used to greet everyone.
Some italian dialects still use sciao instead of ciao.

@kronop8884 1 year ago (edited)

When it comes to Sweden Interestingly, Finnic languages like Finnish and Estonian use terms like Ruotsi and Rootsi, which are derived from the Rus' people who inhabited parts of Sweden currently called Roslagen and whose name also gave rise to Russia.

@somersaultcurse 1 year ago

3:15 im sure he said it in comparison to the german name of germany: Deutschland - the land of the dutch, what he mentioned at 2:26

@RobertErnstD 1 year ago

The name of Georgia in Georgian is… decidedly different though: „Sakartvelo“

@ClemensKindermann 1 year ago

Here in Austria we say ‘Servus!’ as a greeting.
From this Latin term for ‘slave’ it can be deduced that it means ‘at your service’ (and yes, the French word “service”, which was later adopted into English, also comes from ‘servus’). 🙂

@Groffili 1 year ago

The people in the Netherlands never spoke Spanish, or were part of any Spanish culture. They just got... inherited.
The last duke of Burgundy, for all his massive ambition, didn't do so well in the end. His wars failed, he lost his life in a battle against the Swiss, and his only heir was a daughter.
After some inheritance struggles with the French, she brought the Netherlands under Habsburg rule. Her son then married into the Spanish royal family, and his son - emperor Charles V - finally united all these different lands into one gigantic empire... from the newly discovered Americas to Spain, to the Netherlands, to Austria, Northern and Southern Italy and into East Asia. It was said, that in his realm, the sun never set.

He finally divided this huge mess between his son and his brother... and the Netherlands stayed with Spain. They weren't happy about that... at all. They managed to throw their Spanish rulers out after another 80 years of war.
What is now Belgium stayed with Spain for a while, and after another little family squabble - called the War of the Spanish Inheritance - they switched over to the "German" branch of the Habsburgs. They remained a part of "Germany" (or rather: The Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation) until the French Revolution.

@imwinningthisone7613 11 months ago (edited)

The guy actually makes a little bit of an overgeneralization when talking about belgium. Belgium was never part of the modern country "the Netherlands". They were part of a merger state from 1815 to 1830 called the "united kingdom of the Netherlands", which was established after the fall of Napoleon to provide a buffer state between France and Prussia (it united the Dutch Republic and the United Belgian States).

About 2-3 centuries prior to that, both countries were indeed ruled together by the spanish. But saying belgium was part of the Netherlands (the country) during this time is an extreme reach, considering the fact that Spain was in charge, and the country "the Netherlands" is literally named after the geographical region in which the entire benelux lies. This entire thing becomes complicated because in the English language, there is no distinction between the Netherlands as a country, and the Netherlands as a geographical region, while this distinction does exist in the dutch language itself.

So, the only time in history you could say belgium was part of the Netherlands (the country) is that brief 15 year stint, which was only possible because the dutch had already received a king, while belgium declared itself a democratic republic in 1789 during the Brabantine revolution, which is of course in line with Napoleon and France's revolutionary ideals, and everything that the great powers had just fought against. The dutch king was chosen from an influencial dutch house which had strong ties to the British.

@WienerVL 1 year ago

Servus is a greeting in Austria and Bavaria!

@ArneKrawczak 1 year ago

Servus really means to your service as a greeting

@andreasvestergaard5939 1 year ago (edited)

and hey by the way why not mention the stone in jellinge Denmark its the oldest recorded mention of the word DANMARK as a name it is written in runes and is called Denmarks birth certificate

TRANSLATED FROM DAN TO ENG

"King Harald ordered these tombs to be made after Gorm his father and Thyra his mother - the same Harald who conquered all of Denmark and Norway and made the Danes Christians."

@ravenstormchild6491 1 year ago

Etymology has always been a fascination of mine. Love this guy. ❤

@ОлегВолохов-ж8у 1 year ago

'Slavs' have nothing to do with the 'slaves'. It's an autonym and refers to the word 'slovo' which means...'the word" and thus the 'worded' peoples, i.e. the tribes whose speech was understandable.

@bisse23 1 year ago

Denmark had a tribe called Dani wich took the known lands denmark after the anglo saxons migrated mostly to UK and so on

@finnishculturalchannel 1 year ago

In linguistics Finnish is sometimes referred as 'Finnish refrigerator', as Finnish has preserved grammar and old loan words from other languages better than the languages, which have evolved from those languages—including also Paleo-European languages. E.g. in Finnish 'slave' is 'orja', which derives from Proto-Uralic, in which it referred to indo-Iranians; 'arya', meaning Aryans. Regarding German, in Finnish 'king' is 'kuningas', which in Proto-Germanic is 'kuningaz'. In German 'king' is 'könig'. This is the reason why languages like Finnish have interested linguistics. Couple of relating videos: "Know your language: PU", "Languages of Finland before Finns", " Costas Melas Spread of the Indo-European Languages in Eurasia", "Costas Melas History of the Uralic Languages", "Before Indo-European (The Indo-Uralic Hypothesis) Part ONE". "Finnish & Hungarian's long lost cousin - The Nganasan Language" and "Germanic Loanwords in Finnic Languages (with Dr. Johan Schalin)".