English breaks my brain... How is some languages end in -an, but others end in -ese, -ish, etc... [Open Discussion Thread on Languages and their Quirks]
I mean:
English
Russian
French? (how did this happen? France --> French?!?)
Chinese
And someone from Afghanistan is an Afghan? How did the word get shorter not longer? 🤔
Also, why is a person from India called an Indian, but the language is called Hindi? This breaks my brain...
Philippines --> Filipino? They just saw the "Ph" and decided to use an "F"? 🤔
Okay idk how language even works anymore...
[This is an open discusssion thread on languages and their quirks...]
Shameless plug to [email protected] . This sort of question is welcome there.
Latin already did a bloody mess of those suffixes:
if you were born in Roma, you'd be romanus ("Roman")
if you were born in Eboracum (modern York), you'd be eboracensis ("Yorkese")
if you were born in Gallia (roughly modern Belgium and France), you'd be gallicus ("Gallic")
In turn those suffixes used to mean different things:
that -anus was originally just -nus. Inherited from Proto-Indo-European *-nós; you'd plop it after verbs to form adjectives.
that -icus was originally just -cus; from PIE *-kos, but you'd plop it into nouns instead.
nobody really knows where -ensis is from but some claim that Latin borrowed it from Etruscan.
Then French and Norman inherited this mess, and... left it alone? Then English borrowed all those suffixes. But it wasn't enough of a mess, so it kept its native -ish suffix, that means the exact same thing. That -ish is from PIE *-iskos, and likely related to Latin -cus.
And someone from Afghanistan is an Afghan? How did the word get shorter not longer? 🤔
There's some awareness among English speakers that "[$adjective]istan" means roughly "country where the [$adjective] people live", so the suffix is simply removed: Afghanistan → Afghan, Tajikistan → Tajik, etc.
That -istan backtracks to Classical Persian ـستان / -istān, and it forms adjectives from placenames.
In turn it comes from Proto-Indo-European too. It's from the root *steh₂- "to stand", and also a cognate of "to stand". So etymologically "[$adjective]istan" is roughly "where the [$adjective] people stand". (inb4 I'm simplifying it.)
Also, why is a person from India called an Indian, but the language is called Hindi? This breaks my brain…
Note that India doesn't simply have different "languages"; it has a half dozen different language families. Like, some languages of India are closer to English, Russian, Italian etc. than to other Indian languages.
That said:
"India" ultimately backtracks to Greek Ἰνδός / Indós, the river Indus; and Greek borrowed it from Old Persian 𐏃𐎡𐎯𐎢𐏁 / Hindūš. That ending changed because it's what Greek does.
"Hindi" comes from Hindi हिंदी / hindī, that comes from Classical Persian هِنْدِی / hindī. That hind- is the same as in the above, referring to the lands around the Indus (India), and the -ī is "related to".
Now, why did Greek erase the /h/? I have no idea. Greek usually don't do this. But Latin already borrowed the word as "India", showing no aspiration.
Philippines --> Filipino? They just saw the “Ph” and decided to use an “F”? 🤔
So, the islands were named after Felipe II of Spain. And there's that convention that royalty names are translated, so "Felipe II" ended as "Philip II" in English. And so the "Islas Filipinas" ended as "Philippine Islands".
...but then the demonym was borrowed straight from Spanish, including its spelling: filipino → Filipino.
Note that this mess is not exclusive to English. As I hinted above, Latin already had something similar; and in Portuguese for example you see the cognates of those English suffixes (-ese/-ês, -an/-ano, -ic/-ego... just no -ish).
Except that for Portuguese simply inheriting the Latin suffixes wasn't enough, you got to reborrow them too. So you end with etymological doublets like -ego (see: Galícia "Galicia" → galego "Galician") and -co (see: Áustria "Austria" → austríaco "Austrian").
Then there's cases where not even speakers agree on which suffix applies, and it's dialect-dependent; e.g. polonês/polaco (Polish), canadense/canadiano (Canadian).
Besides afegão vs. Afeganistão (Afghan vs. Afghanistan), another example of a word where the demonym is shorter than the geographical name is inglês vs. Inglaterra (English vs. England). But it's the same deal: -terra is simply -land, so people clip it off.
There's also the weird case of "brasileiro" (Brazilian), that -eiro is a profession suffix. Originally it referred to people extracting brazilwood, then the country name was backformed from that.
For anyone else wondering, according to the wiki: “The name "Japan" is based on Min or Wu Chinese pronunciations of 日本 (pronounced a bit like JOO-pun)* and was introduced to European languages through early trade.”
English likely got the name from Portuguese, "Japão" *[ʒä'pɐ̃ŋ] (see note). I don't think that it's from Dutch "Japan" because otherwise the name would end as "Yapan", as Dutch uses a clear [j] ("y") sound.
In turn Portuguese got it from either Malay or some Chinese language. I think that it's from Cantonese 日本 jat⁶ bun² [jɐt˨ puːn˧˥]. Portuguese has this historical tendency to transform [j] into [ʒ] (the "g" in "genre"), and to mess with any sort of nasal ending.
The name in Chinese languages can be analysed as meaning simply "Sun origin". Because it's to the east of China.
In turn, there are a few ways to refer to Japan in Japanese:
日本 / Nihon - it's a cognate of that Cantonese jat⁶ bun². Except that it uses the Japanese rendering of Wu Chinese words.
日本 / Nippon - same as above, with a slightly more conservative pronunciation (Japanese converted a lot of [p] into [h]).
大和 / Yamato - it's metaphorically referring to the whole (Japan) by one of its part (the Yamato province, modern Nara).
日の本の国 / Hinomoto-no-Kuni - poetic and dated name. 日/hi = Sun, 本/moto = origin, 国/kuni = land, の = an adposition**. So it also means "land of the origin of the Sun". The big difference here is that all words used are inherited from Old Japanese, so there's no Chinese borrowing involved.
*note: that [ŋ] is reconstructed for around 1500 or so (Nanban trade times), given the word was also spelled Japam back then. A more typical contemporary pronunciation would be more like [ʒä'pɜ̃ʊ̯].
**the best way I know to explain Japanese の/no is that it works like a reversed English "of": in English you'd say "origin of Sun", in Japanese you'd say "Sun no origin" (hi no moto = 日の本). I only remember this because of Boku no Hero Academia, because "boku no" = "of I" (my).
We didn’t. 中國likely became the most common name with 中華民國(present day commonly known as Taiwan). What you now know as China is 中華人民共和國, so 中國 carries on. During dynasty periods that was not the common name.
China comes from sina/sino. I don’t remember where this comes from. Sanskrit?
Wikipedia says from Portuguese, through Persian, back to Sanskrit, being the grand daddy of English, calling it "cina", and/or it has to do with Qin Dynasty that unified China.
Probably better than whatever bullshit they would have gotten from Zhongguo if "Peking" was as good as they could do with "Beijing"
Because the name of the nation comes from the Iroquoian word "kanata" (for "village") and mythology says that Jacques Cartier mistook that for the name of the land.
If I'm free to discuss what ever language quirk I'd want to, then let's talk about German nouns. How did they end up with three genders (die, das and der) for their nouns? English has none, French has two just like Swedish mostly has two but the Germans ended up with five.
For any English speakers unfamiliar with the concept of noun gender it's basically a way of grouping nouns. It commonly effects how they word works with other grammar. For example the German genders determine whether die, das or der should be used when English has the and it does, in a more convoluted way involving other grammar to, determine whether ein, eine, einen or einem should be used where English has a/an