why Germans would be called almond anything!-- and i can't for the life of me think who uses it!
There are four roots for names of Germans. The Latin and English name is related to the Latin germanus 'related' and presumably germen 'bud, sprout': so probably meant 'kin, confederacy, tribe' and then came to be applied to all the people of Germania. I don't know exactly.
The Spanish aleman and French allemand come from the Allemanni, one of the German tribes during the Roman period. I don't know why their name came to be the name of all Germans. The name is presumably Germanic itself, meaning 'all men'. Perhaps another confederacy name.
The Slavonic names are generally something like nemets. I have a vague recollection this means 'dumb'; the Slavs called themselves the speakers (slovo = 'word') and so anyone not Slavonic-speaking was a non-speaker. Can anyone confirm or correct this?
The most interesting root is the Indo-European teut-, meaning 'people'. As well as giving Teutonic and Dutch and Deutsch, it gives the Irish Tuatha in Tuatha De Danaan, the Italian tedesco which is their word for 'German', and the Old English theod. This didn't survive into modern English but Tolkien readers will recognize it in King Theoden.
There's also the Germanic word folk. This has no known counterpart outside the Germanic languages, and it's been suggested it came from an underlying language that was there before the Indo-Europeans. Someone has even called this hypothetical language "Folkish" on account of that.
