(My Googling was surprisingly unhelpful, even when I inserted the keyword “demonym”).
What is the origin of the suffix -i as an adjective for “a country or its
people”?
It’s used (at least in English) for SOME of the Arabic speaking world (Saudi, Iraqi, Yemeni…), plus Hebrew (Israeli), but not ALL of it (Moroccan, Egyptian, Lebanese…).
It’s also used for SOME of the Indo-Iranian (branch of IE) speaking world (for languages and regions, not just countries) (Hindi, Bengali, Azeri, Afghani), but not all of it (Persian/Iranian).
I’m guessing it’s a Semitic (Afro-Asiatic) suffix that was adopted into the languages of the Mughal empire…but ???
(If so, this sort of parallels how -stan for “country” spread from Indo-European — specifically, Old Persian — into Turkic regions like Kazakhstan).
One possibility - is it that the -i ones tend to be more modern-named countries than the non-i-suffixed ones? So the -i ones were named when hewing closer to local names was actually of diplomatic concern. Whereas before, those places were all just part of “Arabia” or “India”
French influence, I guess. It’s libanais in French (based on the -ais ending that is quite common in that language). Lebanon became a French mandatory territory after WWI and, to this day, French has a strong position in cultural and intellectual life in the country.
Yes, in both Hebrew and Arabic, “thing that embodies these qualities/nationality” is communicated through the -i suffix. So in Hebrew you have Israeli, Yehudi (Jewish), Amerikai (American), Tzarfati (French), etc etc
“Am” means “nation” or “peoples”, so a folk song or tale that’s unattributed to a specific author is described as “Amami”.
Spanish does it, too, with an accented i at the end: israelí, marroquí, catarí, iraní, iraquí, somalí, omaní, saudí, pakistaní, etc., and it’s also applied to the inhabitants of some Spanish cities, such as marbellí (from Marbella). Doesn’t seem to happen much in reference to Latin America. There are words like guaraní, but that comes from the native lanuage of those people (same in English).