Theodiscus

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Theodiscus

, the latinised form of Germanic diutisc ("vernacular", "native" or "indigenous"), is a Middle Latin adjective referring to the Germanic vernaculars of the Early Middle Ages. The Old High German language in Latin sources of the time is referred to as .

The use of theodisce/deutsch was first attested ^[1] ^[2] in 786 in a report to Pope Hadrian I. Texts from a synod held in Corbridge, England were read "both in Latin and in the vernacular".

It is derived from Common Germanic . The stem of this word, , meant "people" in Common Germanic, and was an adjective-forming suffix, of which -ish is the Modern English form. The Old English form is , the Old High German one (attested ca. 1090 in the Annolied).The opposite, describing anything foreign or strange, is walhisk (welsh), which was used to refer to Roman or Celtic people.

Ultimately, the word is traced back to Proto-Indo-European language , meaning "tribe".^[3]

It has survived in the English word Dutch, the German words and , the Dutch words and , the Yiddish word , the Danish word , the Swedish word , the Icelandic word "people, nation" and the modern Italian word "German".

While morphologically, the modern term Teutonic is a direct derivation from Teutones, its semantic components consist of an amalgam of notions traditionally associated with the Germanic peoples and the Germans.

Starting with the publication of Julius Caesar's Commentarii de Bello Gallico (ca. 50 BC), a report on the Gallic War supplemented with various ethnographic remarks, Latin scholars generally considered the Teutones as the epitome of a wandering Germanic tribe.^[4] In later years, Roman writers would sometimes use the term Teutonicus as a poetic pars pro toto synonym for their existing adjective Germanicus. Both linguistically and ethnographically, however, neither the Teutonic ethnos nor the term from which their name was derived can be clearly identified as either Germanic or Celtic. Some modern scholars consider the Teutones to be more closely associated with the Celtic Helvetii than with Germanic groups, whilst the IE root *teut? ("people") is well attested in both the Germanic and the Celtic lexica.^[5]^[6]

Around 900 Germans writing in Latin started to use the more learned teutonicus to replace the earlier theodiscus, the latinised form of Germanic diutisc ("vernacular"). This fairly random equation of an ancient ethnonym with a contemporary term, comparable to the equation Getae - Goths popularised by Jordanes, or the even more adventurous Dacia - Dania (Denmark) found e.g. in French chronicles. Hence the official title of the Teutonic Order (Ordo domus Sanctć Marić Theutonicorum Ierosolimitanorum - "Order of St. Mary's house of the Germans of Jerusalem").

The term Teutonic was used by the economist William Z. Ripley to designate one of the three "races" of Europe, which later writers called the Nordic race. Due to similar racism-related abuses down to the first half of the 20th century, the term "teutonisch" has since fallen out of favour amongst German-speaking scholars, and is restricted to a somewhat ironical usage similar to the archaic teutsch, if used at all. While the term is still present in English, which has retained it in some contexts as a translation of the traditional Latin Teutonicus (most notably the aforementioned Teutonic Order), it should not be translated into German as "teutonisch" except when referring to the historical Teutones.