Talk:Germany

Plural forms

In Google Books' corpus, Germanys is about one-third or one-half as common as Germanies. (Ngrams search: the *3 multiplies Germanys by 3, and you can see the result is that its line overlaps that of Germanies.) In the British National Corpus, Germanys occurs 34 times, Germanies 33; in the Corpus of Contemporary American English, Germanys occurs 105 times, Germanies 59. Germanies Germanys is not "rare", so I've restored mention of it. - -sche (discuss) 16:31, 27 September 2014 (UTC)

No one was arguing about "Germanies", so I think your last sentence was meant to be "Germanys is not 'rare'". It certainly is nonstandard for its entire history in English and should not precede "Germanies" in the entry. You may be right that it's somewhat common enough for mention here but, if your formatting requires giving it undue prominence, it remains best dealt with as an alternative form at the Germanies entry. — LlywelynII 21:55, 27 September 2014 (UTC)

Yes, I meant "Germanys is not 'rare'"; thanks for catching the typo. Removing the single outlying mention of Germanies in 1598 (because it distorts / makes it hard to see the rest of the chart), one sees that Germanys has not been that much less common than Germanies ([1]), particularly for the past two centuries ([2]). Both are dwarfed by the singular ([3]). I am fine with listing Germanies before Germanys in this entry, despite the BNC and COCA data suggesting that Germanys is the more common form in modern English. - -sche (discuss) 01:51, 28 September 2014 (UTC)

Etymology

For what it's worth, I did find it odd that The Concise Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology would disagree so markedly with the OED. Sure enough, the earlier editor was misstating his citation. The entry does not read that it is "likely" a "a Celtic/Gaulish term... that meant 'neighbor'" but rather "perh. of Celt. orig. (cf. OIr. gair neighbour)". I'll restore the info in that fashion, but it shouldn't be restated as "likely" or as a fact (and may need to be removed to avoid people unduly reading it that way). — LlywelynII 22:04, 27 September 2014 (UTC)