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The Baltic Sea is in northeastern Europe, bounded by the Scandinavian Peninsula, the mainland of east and central Europe, and the Danish islands. It drains into the Kattegat and the North Sea by way of the Öresund, the Great Belt and the Small Belt. It is linked to the White Sea by the White Sea Canal and to the North Sea by Kiel Canal.
1 Name
The first one to name it the Baltic Sea was Adam of Bremen and he seems to have based it on a large island, Baltia, mentioned by Xenophon and located in northern Europe. It is possibly connected to the Germanic belt, a name used for some of the Danish straits, while others claim it to be derived from Latin balteus (belt)[1]. From this use, Baltic has been applied to the Baltic countries. Another proposed derivation from the Indo-EuropeanIndo-European is originally a linguistic term, referring to the Indo-European language family. By extension, it became a collective name for cultures and religions associated with these languages. Hypothetically, these cultures arose from the expansion of root *bhel meaning white, shining seems speculative.
The Baltic Sea is known by the equivalents of "East Sea", "West Sea", or "Baltic Sea" in different languages:
- In the Germanic languagesThe Germanic languages form one of the branches of the Indo-European (IE) language family, spoken by the Germanic peoples who settled in northern Europe along the borders of the Roman Empire. They are characterised by a number of unique linguistic feature except English East Sea is used: DanishDanish is one of the Scandinavian languages, a sub-group of the Germanic group of the Indo-European language family. History Most Danish words are derived from the Old Norse language, with new words formed by compounding. A large percentage of Danish word (Østersøen), DutchDutch is a West Germanic language spoken worldwide by around 21 million people. The variety of Dutch spoken in Belgium is also informally called Flemish . The Dutch name for the language is Nederlands or less formal Hollands and Dutch is sometimes called (Oostzee), GermanGerman (called Deutsch in German in which germanisch refers to prechristian times), is a member of the western group of Germanic languages and one of the world's major languages. It is the language with the most native speakers in the European Union. (Ostsee), NorwegianNorwegian is a Germanic language spoken in Norway. Norwegian is closely related to, and generally mutually intelligible with Swedish and Danish. Together with these two languages, Norwegian belongs to the Northern, or Scandinavian group of the Germanic la (Østersjøen), and SwedishSwedish svenska is a language spoken principally in Sweden, Finland finlandsvenska , Aland and in the coastland of Estonia estlandssvenska . Swedish is classified as a member of the East section of the Scandinavian languages, a sub-group of the Germanic g (Östersjön).
