The other thread about “The Irish, the Swedish, the Jewish” got me wondering about uncommon suffixes for denoting somebody’s nationality. Most of them are either “ish,” “ese” or “an.” Scottish, Chinese, Italian, etc.
Let me just say obviously I’m referring to the English names for these nationalities, because of course in other languages they are going to be different.
But in English, there seems to be a pretty small number of nationality names which do not fall into either the “ish,” “ese” or “an” categories. Here are the few I could come up with:
Savoyard
Basque
Greek
Turk
Manx
Thai
Afghan
Bangladeshi
I’m not sure if Croat counts because as I almost said at the end of the OP before hitting Submit too soon, as in “Serb,” people also say “Serbian” and “Croatian.” I’m talking about names that have no “an” form.
Kind of, but the “an” comes from the name of the country itself and is not a suffix added to a shortened form of it. I guess that one’s on the borderline.
(Yeah, I know, Scottish is probably the more common term these days, but Scots fits your OP request and I’ve been yelled at by Scots when I called them Scottish)
It is not clear whether the OP is asking for adjectives describing a nationality, or demonyms (nouns meaning people of that nationality). E.g. Icelandic vs. Icelander. From the description it sounds like the former, because there is no such thing as “a Scottish”. But then “Turk” doesn’t fit.
“Scottish”, btw, is fine as an adjective. “Scots” and “Scotch” are also used, depending on what you’re talking about. For example, the parliament is the Scottish parliament, not “Scots”.