Does anyone know the etymology of the German word for novel? Is it in any way linked to Rome, and, if so, how?
Yes, it comes from Old French Romanz from Latin Romanicus from Romanus from Rome.
Do you know how it came to mean novel?
Indeed, it is basically a loosening of the original meaning “Roman-like, of Romans, of Rome, etc” so that it eventually no longer means what the word itself literally specifies, but metaphorically generalizes much beyond, and then just seems more or less to mean “tale”. From there it is logical to imagine how it may be stretched further to mean “novel”.
In Dutch the word ‘roman’ is also used for ‘novel’, according to http://www.etymologie.nl/ its etymologie is:
Roman = ‘medieval epic tale in verse about the adventures of a knight’ [1642]; ‘tale in which the simple life in the country is idealised’ [17th century], ‘realistic adventure story’ [17th century], ‘poetic history about the fates of a special person, with attention to the character description’ [1847].
Lent from the French “roman?, ‘tale written in folk language’ [1155], ‘invented story’ [16th century], ‘impassioned love story’ [1659], from older ‘romanz’, “folk language? [ca 1125] developed from vulgar Latin ‘romanice’, “the Roman way?, from ‘Romanus’, “Roman?. This word initially related to the Gaelic-Romanic romanticised tale in contrast to those of the Germanic barbarians. When in the 12th century the literature in the folk language acquired terrain, a new contradiction began: the French folk language opposed to that of the Latin of the educated class; subsequently ‘roman’ came to mean “in Roman or Old-French written tale’.
The various cognates of “romance” in the Romance languages were the term for the local Latin-derived (but not Latin) languages. Tales of chivalry and romance (in the current sense) were in Romance rather than Latin, and the language name expanded to include the genres written in it.
Thanks for the info. That etymology is fascinating.
Romanice - pronounced early on as [ro’ma(:)nitse] in vulgar Latin or Lingua Rustica Romanica. In the eastern parts (including Italy), romanice was pronounced like in Italian - [ro’ma:niche], like the word church. That’s what I think…
That [ts] cluster for ‘c’ sounds me too Germanic or Slavic… but I may be wrong.
There is no way that western Romance languages had the same use of c before e and i as in Italian or Romanian. It is common knowedge that TS was a very widely used pronunciation of Medieval and vulgar Latin. Gaius Iuuulius Tseeesar printseps imperaator romaanus… 
BTW I am well versed in most usual Latin pronuncations.
In Old French and Old Spanish ts was used in the case of c before e and i. Hence the French use of it as an s in Modern French…
I never meant that it had the same sound as in Eastern Romance (that is obvious), but ‘ts’ sounds too strange to me.
‘Ts’ sound was never the sound of c in Old Spanish (don’t know about French). It was rather the sound of ç, not the same letter.
Well, wikipedia:
Voiceless alveolar affricate (/ts/): represented by the letter ç.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Spanish
Same I said in the previous post.
Then we agree… ts.