this post was submitted on 19 Jan 2024
135 points (93.0% liked)
World News
32328 readers
939 users here now
News from around the world!
Rules:
-
Please only post links to actual news sources, no tabloid sites, etc
-
No NSFW content
-
No hate speech, bigotry, propaganda, etc
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I've literally never heard that or read anything suggesting that. Britain/Britons has been used to describe the islands and peoples of the north Atlantic archipelago since ancient times with great Britain simply referring to the largest island (i.e. England+Scotland+Wales), as per wiki
Written record
The first known written use of the word was an ancient Greek transliteration of the original P-Celtic term. It is believed to have appeared within a periplus written in about 325 BC by the geographer and explorer Pytheas of Massalia, but no copies of this work survive. The earliest existing records of the word are quotations of the periplus by later authors, such as those within Diodorus of Sicily's history (c. 60 BC to 30 BC), Strabo's Geographica (c. 7 BC to AD 19) and Pliny's Natural History (AD 77).[10] According to Strabo, Pytheas referred to Britain as Bretannikē, which is treated a feminine noun.[11][12][13][14] Although technically an adjective (the Britannic or British) it may have been a case of noun ellipsis, a common mechanism in ancient Greek. This term along with other relevant ones, subsequently appeared inter alia in the following works: