Thursday, July 9, 2009

Words to remember - Demonym

So I was watching a movie the other day (one of those set in WW2) and noticed that Jewish people were called Jews but German people were called Germans. Found it odd/interesting that in a few rare cases we have a different word between the generic adjective for things that come from a place, and the people that come from a place. I found I could distinguish the two by saying:

A [x] is [y]

So a Jew is Jewish

But a German is German.

Using this to stop myself getting context confused, I started running through different countries to try and figure out how often this occurs.
Australians are Australian, Americans are American, Canadians are Canadian. Seemed like most places I could think of were all boring and used the same variants.

Then I though to Great Britain and surrounds:
An Enligshman is English
A Scottsman (or Scott) is Scottish
An Irishman is Irish
A Frenchman is French.

Not as boring as being the same, but still pretty boring.

So I wanted to look this stuff up, but couldn't think what to look up.

Then stumbled across this on wikipedia page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demonym

Turns out Demonym is the word for a name of a person derived from their location name. Quite interesting reading on that page, recommend it. For instance, sometimes the reverse is true, and a place is named after the inhabitants, such as Thailand. Never made the connection before that Thailand is the land Thais inhabit.

Anyway, found all this a while ago... then forgot the words demonym, so now i've posted it somewhere i shouldn't forget again!