Random thoughts circulating in my brain today produced questions about how we, in the English language, refer to individuals from other nations. Specifically, the way we use (or don’t use) suffixes. For example:
He is German.
He is Italian.
He is Austrian.
He is English.
He is French.
He is Dutch.
He is Swiss.
He is Swedish.
Okay, now include the article “a/an” in those sentences:
He is a German.
He is an Italian.
He is an Austrian.
He is an Englishman.
He is a Frenchman.
He is a Dutchman.
He is a Swiss…, um, what goes here?
He is a Swede.
Why do the first three nationalities remain unchanged when the article is added, but we add “-man” to the next three? Is it just the “sh/ch” sound that somehow requires the addition? And what the heck do you do with “Swiss”?
And I tacked “Swedish/Swede” on there as an afterthought when it occurred to me, “Why don’t we say, ‘he is a Swedishman’ the same way we would use ‘Englishman’?” Obviously, in that case, “Swede” was the original name of the people in that area, and that’s where the name “Sweden” came from. But by the same method, “England” comes from the “Angles” who conquered the island. Why don’t we therefore say, “he is an Angle/Engle” instead of “Englishman”? Is it just that a resident of Sweden is that much more likely to be descended from the original Swedes than a resident of England is to be descended from actual Angles?
Because natural languages weren’t designed from the ground up with consistent rules; they evolved through an undirected, haphazard process which has resulted in parallel and inconsistently applied features and systems of logic. You’ve discovered this is the case for demonyms, but the same can be said for almost every other aspect of syntax, semantics, and morphology you care to examine.
The noun is the same as the adjective. This is the most common, I think, and is used for nationalities all over the world.
An Italian
An Australian
An Iraqi
A German
A Norwegian
There is no noun, or a noun can only be formed by adding “-man” or “-woman”
Irish, Manx, English, Swiss, French
There is a special noun, separate from the adjective.
Turk, Finn, Swede, Dane, Spaniard, Jew, Scot, Arab, Pole.
Categories 2) and 3) are quite limited in number, and also reasonably grouped geographically (2 being very close to England, 3 being “old” nationalities known to the English for a long time).
You forgot the case where there is a noun but no adjective, which is rare for countries but common for smaller political or geographic entities, such as cities. You can say, for example, “He is a Winnipeger” but not *“He is Winnipeger”.
I don’t think either of these claims are true; demonyms with differing nominal and adjectival forms are quite numerous and also geographically widespread. The Wikipedia article on demonyms catalogues a lot of them.
Having read the article I don’t see any list of demonyms where the noun differs from the adjective, so I stand over my claim. Can you point me to some more examples of category 3 in case I’m missing something?
My theory is that category 1 is the normal rule in English. A “new” nationality entering the language will follow the rule of noun=adjective.
The article lists the demonyms by suffix, and not by your categorization scheme, so you have to scan and pick them out manually (for example, Slovakian/Slovak, Serbian/Serb, Croatian/Croat). They do specifically point out one general class of irregularities, though:
For at least some of these doublets, though, there is a clear dichotomy between political citizenship and ethnic nationality, so that, e.g., “Nearly a third of Slovakians are of Magyar extraction” vs. “The State Senator said he was proud to have lived all his life in the same Slovak neighborhood in Toledo that he was born in.”
Good point. The example of this I am most familiar with is “Malaysian” (citizen of that country; may be ethnically Chinese, Indian, Orang Asli, etc.) vs. “Malay” (ethnolinguistically Austronesian). Both terms are both adjectives and nouns.
So it would make a certain amount of sense that “Swede” is referring more to ethnicity than nationality, but the reverse for “English”, if for no other reason than Britain being invaded by more different groups of people (i.e. everybody from Vikings to Romans) than Sweden ever was.
So it would make a certain amount of sense to not attach an ethnic identifier to residence in England.
So it would make a certain amount of sense that “Swede” is referring more to ethnicity than nationality…/QUOTE]
I don’t think so. Swedish speaking people in Finland have no problems with identifying themselves as Finns.