[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.

[thaumasiotes]

> 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.

This is a statement with no implications; "Germanic", in its meaning "related to German", will mean exactly the same thing regardless of which dialect you designate as "German".

Compare how "canids" are the same taxonomical group of animals regardless of which animal within them is called the "canine".

[FarmerPotato]

>the second is borrowed from the English linguistic terminology.

Borrowed from Latin Germānicus, from Germāni.

[thaumasiotes]

Think a little harder. You can trace the word back that far. Is that how it got into German or Spanish?

[FarmerPotato]

I do not know who borrowed when.