Apologies if the subject doesn’t make any sense, but here’s what I’m talking about.
If you want to describe someone or something as being from or related to a certain country, you use an adjective form of that country’s name. Example, Terrence and Phillip are from Canada; they are Canadian.
My puzzlement has to do with the many different forms that get used when making adjectives out of various countries’ or regions’ names.
England --> English. OK, got it.
Finland --> Finnish. What, where’d the ‘l’ go?
Ireland --> Irish. Same deal, where’d the ‘l’ go?
Thailand --> Thai. OK, now where’d the ‘ish’ go?
When we get to other countries, the whole “-ish” format gets completely discarded.
Germany --> German.
Iraq --> Iraqi.
China --> Chinese.
Norway --> Norwegian.
Afghanistan --> Afghan.
Pakistan --> Pakistani.
Guam --> Guamanian.
Greece --> Greek.
Given that these are all English-language names for these countries, why are the rules for converting them to adjective format so varied?
There are so many different forms mainly because the names of countries and nationalities are often borrowed from other languages, and so follow rules of those languages. However, the English/Finnish/Irish difference is quite easy to explain. The “l” did not vanish from “Finnish” and “Irish” because it was never there in the first place. The country names were built as Finn-land and Ire-land. In the case of England, there was an extra “l” because it was originally “Englaland”, i.e., the land of the Angles. Over the centuries, the name of the country lost the double “l”, but the name of the nationality only had one “l” to start with.
Right, it’s not that the “L” mysteriously disappeared from the other adjectives; it’s that it disappeared from the name of the country “England”. The others, it’s missing for the same reason that the “and” is missing: Those are all part of the suffix -land, meaning, well, land.
For the others, I’ll note that the first European country to have direct, regular contact with China and Japan was Portugal. So just as Portugal gets the -ese ending, so too do China and Japan, because that’s what the Portuguese considered it natural to call them, and all of the other Europeans followed their lead. If instead the first European trade had been with England, we’d probably say “Chinish” and “Japanish”.
There are no rules. There are only historic conventions. The need to refer to people from a certain place rose hundreds of times over centuries and so were subject to the conventions of different eras. Sometimes older models were followed, sometimes newer ones were substituted. The people of the Chin dynasty are now referred to as Chinese, but in the 16th century were known as Chinish. Thailand wasn’t the name of the country until 1973. Until then it was Siam as in Siamese cat. The -ese ending in English terms is from the French, the people of the franca in Old English. The *Portuguez *use -ez.
You can throw a dart at a U.S. map and hit places where no one naming convention has ever thrown out all the others. Albany, Pittsburgh, Connecticut. If there were any rules, these would easily handled. Ergo, there are no rules.
Nitpick: Thailand’s name was ประเทศไทย (Prathet Thai), or a variation thereof, for centuries (and both before and after 1973!). The English form ‘Thailand’ was invented when the country got tired of being known by the exonym ‘Siam.’ The country was admitted to the U.N. in 1946 as ‘Siam,’ but in 1949, the country informed the U.N. Secretary-General of the preferred ‘Thailand’ designation.
Slight deviation. How come Cote d’Ivore gets to order the English speaking world to use the French name for Ivory Coast, but Republique Centrafricaine and Tchad and Maroc and Masr and Bharat and Al-Urdun and Jungguo are told to go to hell, we’re going to keep on using English?
There are countries inhabited by Afghans, Kazakhs, Uzbeks, Kyrgyz, Turkmen, Tadjiks, but it is a slur if you refer to people in Pakistan that way.
All words denoting national place of origin are borderline slurs or can be seen as such, because of the presumption that you wouldn’t be talking about them unless you intended to be demeaning.
That’s because Afghanistan, Kazakhstan, etc are named after the nations that inhabit them - the name of the people precedes the name of the state - but Pakistan is not.
Things get even more fun when you zero in on cities rather than countries.
People from London are Londoners
People from Glasgow are Glaswegians
People from Liverpool are Liverpudlians
People from Birmingham are Brummies
People from Aberdeen are Aberdonians
People from Newcastle are Novocastrians
I never did figure out what people from Edinburgh are, even when I lived there.
