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« Last post by Jonathon on January 29, 2026, 02:18:58 PM »
I was reading something about Jewish ethnic divisions and saw that Ashkenaz meant 'Germany' in medieval Hebrew (though a different source said it referred to a region centered on the Rhineland). Ashkenaz comes from an earlier Ashkuz (apparently due to scribal error), which was borrowed into Hebrew from the Akkadian Iškuzāya, meaning 'Scythia'. The Scythians were a group of Iranic nomads who migrated into the area around the Caucasus Mountains and Black Sea beginning in the 9th century BC.
I'm not sure how the Hebrew word went from referring to the region where to the Scythians lived to part of modern-day Germany. I'm guessing it first broadened to refer to the lands to the north more generally and then narrowed again to refer to a specific but different land to the north.
The name Scythia comes from the endonym Skuδa, from the Proto-Indo-European root *skewd-, meaning 'shooter, archer'. And at least one site I checked said this etymology is disputed, but the English word shoot may come from the same root.
Anyway, I thought it was funny to see how it went from Scythian (an Indo-European language) to Akkadian (an Afro-Asiatic language) to Hebrew (also Afro-Asiatic) to English (Indo-European again) and how it shifted from one specific region and group of people to a completely different region and then to the Jews who lived in and around that region.
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