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unenkuva t1_j6gmtjb wrote

Sometimes it is after the tribe or area in the country that was the most familiar/closest to the country naming it. Like Germany being called 'Saksa' in Finnish because of the contact to the Saxons.

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im_the_real_dad t1_j6hlzz0 wrote

An example from the US is the Anasazi, a long gone people in the Southwest. When the Navajo came down from (what is now) Canada in the 1400s and 1500s, they referred to the people that already lived there as "ancient enemy" or "anasazi" in the Navajo language. The descendants of the Anasazi, the modern-day pueblo peoples, prefer to call them "Ancestral Puebloan".

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