[us-merul]

For a while, I mistakenly thought that “Germanic” meant related to German specifically. Old English makes more sense if you’re aware of Frisian, Dutch, and other non-Scandinavian Germanic languages, since that’s the area it originated from. German and Spanish make this distinction explicit (Deutsch/Germanisch and Alemán/Germánica).

[bgnn]

I don't know the German speakers, but knowing both Dutch and English this text is more readable to me than using only modern English knowledge.

[thaumasiotes]

> For a while, I mistakenly thought that “Germanic” meant related to German specifically.

...it does. That's why the form of the word is "Germanic". That's what it means.

There are different levels at which you can be related to something. In this case the contrast is between Indo-European languages related to German and Indo-European languages not related to German (except through the shared ancestor called proto-Indo-European).

> German and Spanish make this distinction explicit (Deutsch/Germanisch and Alemán/Germánica).

I suspect the reason for that is that the first of each of those pairs is the native word and the second is borrowed from the English linguistic terminology.

[us-merul]

There isn’t one singular “German.” Sure, there’s a standard form in the country Germany, but the language family is more diverse than that. My point is that the English terminology fuses the language family with the modern country of Germany.

[FarmerPotato]

>the second is borrowed from the English linguistic terminology.

Borrowed from Latin Germānicus, from Germāni.