Today I discovered that the English word country is in fact cognate to Latin (and descendents’) contra; apparently it comes (via Old French) from a Vulgar Latin phrase terra contrata “land lying opposite”. Wouldn’t have guessed that! 😲 The Anglo-Saxon word is land.

@odd Heh, I’m not really surprised! I imagine “land” would be common in all the other Germanic languages 😊 In fact, among the European languages I know anything much about, I think English is fairly unique in introducing this distinction between “land” and “country” in the first place.

@jayeless it’s a lot of Land in German, too. Although, we do have Staat, too. Never thought about it, but I think Staat is used when having a political conversation, Land might be more geographical? 🤔
(Disclaimer: This really is the first time I’ve pondered this and could be completely false.)

@Stefanyeah I don’t know German, but just from how the word “state” is used in English, I’d say your theory sounds pretty likely. I mean ofc in English a state can be a subdivision of a federal country (like I live in the state of Victoria) but when it’s used about a whole country it’s to talk about it as a political entity (rather than the territory or the people or whatever). So if it’s similar in German that’d make sense 😃

@jayeless One can of course say that one live in a state of euphoria as well. @stefanyeah

@odd Oh for sure, it has that meaning too! In fact I think that’s the meaning that came first, haha.

@jayeless Yeah, been thinking about it a bit more. I could say “The Staat should be doing something about this” when I want government to do some governmenting. I would never say: “The Land should be doing something about it.”
Although, we’ve got our federal states that are referred to as Länder and have their own sets of laws, but that’s taking it too far for this late in the morning.

@Stefanyeah Oh, that’s interesting that in German your states are called Länder! It makes sense but I wouldn’t necessarily have guessed it 😃