Dutch apple pie

What parts of the brain distinguish words from sentences? Why Are People From The Netherlands Dutch apple pie Dutch?

A demonym is any name derived from a place that helps describe people who live there. Californians are people who live in California. But what about the demonyms that are seemingly random? How the heck did people from the Netherlands become the Dutch, for example? Where Dutch came from Before we dig into this demonym, there are three terms we need to define: Holland, the Netherlands, and Dutch. This also helps explain why Germany is called Deutschland in German. Over time, English-speaking people used the word Dutch to describe people from both the Netherlands and Germany, and now just the Netherlands today.

At that point in time, in the early 1500s, the Netherlands and parts of Germany, along with Belgium and Luxembourg, were all part of the Holy Roman Empire. Specifically the phrase High Dutch referred to people from the mountainous area of what is now southern Germany. The term was so widely used that when they became a formal, separate country in 1815, they became the Kingdom of the Netherlands. Other demonyms In some cases, the demonym preceded the place name. For example, Finland is the place where the Finns live, just as Germany is the place where the Germans live.

The people came before the official government and place name. Parts of what we call Germany was called Prussia until 1932. In English we denote place of origin by suffixes. Where did these suffixes come form?