Because the OP is looking for a noun, not an adjective. A person from France is a Frenchman/woman, not a French.
And that’s exactly what led me to this train of thought originally. (A few years ago.) Being happy that as an American, I didn’t have to worry about now needing new non-gendered words for citizens. Then I thought about “and our word for citizens could be the same as our language, but isn’t. Whose is? Germany! There must be others…”
Thus that original thought (“first”, not “unique”, clearly) precludes using adjectives in the first place. But again, it’s totally arbitrary.
*Discourse sucks. When I put a quote in a post it’s because I want that quote in my post.
Cool fact of the day - I never knew this.
Am I the only one who is bothered by the fact we’re talking about how people in other countries describe themselves and their non-English language…in English?
Wouldn’t right question be whether the French use the same word to describe their language and their people in French? And so on?
If there were an assumption of superiority or universality about English, or if we were employing racist or derogatory terms, sure, that would be bad. But discussing particular quirks of the English language? Why is that bad?
You’d be hard pressed to have the same conversation in Indonesian, but I suppose someone might ask whether there are nationalities whose languages have names that are different from the countries in question. Mostly they are the same - “orang Perancis” is French person, “bahasa Perancis” is French language, “orang Jerman” is German person, “bahasa Jerman” is German language and so on. But if someone Indonesian wanted to remark on the fact that “orang Amerika Serikat” is an American but “bahasa Inggris” is the national language, that wouldn’t be bothersome, would it?
It’s not bad, it’s just strange to me that a topic so non- English-centric would be approached from a purely English direction. I was also curious whether other languages had a similar trend of overlapping the terms for speech an speaker - which you touched on the answer to, so thanks!
You really have to approach it from the outside, though. In a country that is linguistically homogenous, their name for the people who speak the language is “us”.
Romanian
adjective
relating to Romania or its people or language.
noun
a native or inhabitant of Romania, or a person of Romanian descent.
the language of Romania, a Romance language influenced by the neighbouring Slavic languages. It is spoken by over 23 million people in Romania itself and by the majority of the population of Moldova.
Yes and no. I have known Indonesians and Malaysians who tell me while the former can understand the latter, the latter cannot always understand the former. They’re basically the same people, but once Malaysia came under British control and Indonesia under Dutch, the language started diverging to some extent.
He’s a Burman
She’s a Burwoman
They speak Burmanian
Burma Shave