The French?
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Roger Cohen, "The French Want to Remain The French", NYT 1/27/2023:
As an exercise in style, the tweet from The Associated Press Stylebook appeared to strain taste and diplomacy: “We recommend avoiding general and often dehumanizing ‘the’ labels such as the poor, the mentally ill, the French, the disabled, the college educated.”
At least it looked offensive to the French, or perhaps rather to people of Frenchness, or people with Gallic inclinations, or people under the influence of French civilization. The French noted that they had been placed between the “mentally ill” and the “disabled.”
An image of the offending tweet:
And the embassy's response:
There are many political/cultural/historical overtones here, but I'm going to focus on some issues of morphosyntax and semantics. (Well, maybe a little pragmatics as well…)
In English, a noun can be in general be morphologically singular or plural, and can be preceded by various articles and quantifiers. And each version can be interpreted with generic or specific reference.
Except it seems to depend on what the noun is, in a complicated way.
So for example we have
| Generic | Specific | |
| Singular | The lion eats meat. A lion eats meat. *Lion eats meat. |
The lion roared. A lion roared. *Lion roared. |
| Plural | *The lions eat meat. Lions eat meat. |
The lions roared. Lions roared. |
But
| Generic | Specific | |
| Singular | *The man is mortal. A man is mortal. Man is mortal. |
The man spoke. A man spoke. *Man spoke. |
| Plural | *The men are mortal. Men are mortal. |
The men spoke. Men spoke. |
…and
| Generic | Specific | |
| Singular | *The woman is mortal. A woman is mortal. Woman is mortal. |
The woman is sleeping. A woman spoke. *Woman spoke. |
| Plural | *The women are mortal. Women are mortal. |
The women are sleeping. Women spoke. |
It's not clear to me why determiner-less "man" works as a generic subject, while other nouns generally don't. For example, the english-corpora.org Wikipedia corpus has 115 examples of the pattern {. man is}, e.g.
Man is considered a sentient being of the fifth order.
Man is the tool-using, fire-making animal.
Man is a social being.
…but just 9 instances of {. animal is}, in all of which "animal" is the name of a (human) individual or a song name.
Determiner-less "woman" is less common, partly because traditional attention, talk and writing is somewhat male-focused, and partly because of the semi-traditional view that masculine terms can be taken to refer to humans of all genders.
Anyhow, to get back to the case in point, there are several related morphosyntactic oddities about English ethnonyms ending in /ʃ/,/tʃ/, /z/, etc. We're not allowed to form regular plurals of such words: *Frenches, *Britishes, *Irishes, *Chineses. Instead, the plural is the same as the singular. And the plain form cannot be used to refer to a specific singular person — the traditional solution was to append -man or -woman, though making person the head noun is less sexist:
The Italian was eating.
An Italian was eating.
*The French was eating.
*A French was eating.
The French person was eating.
A French person was eating.
Note that in some cases, there are different singular forms for people, e.g. Polish/Pole, Scottish/Scot — but not for French. And also note that the bare form of these nouns (French, English, Polish, Chinese) can be used in the singular to refer to the language — and sometimes in the plural to refer to different varieties of the language, as in "World Englishes". Overall, a paradigm example of quasiregularity.
See also "Generic comparisons", 11/7/2011.
And the debate over "person-first" vs. "identity-first" language is also somewhat relevant.
Laura Morland said,
January 30, 2023 @ 9:19 am
As I sit here in Paris, I'm marvelling at the spot-on colloquial English of the French Embassy's deliciously witty tweet! ("I guess this is us now….")
By the way, it has never once occurred to me that we say "The Italian/German/Russian/Mexican was eating" but never "*The French/Irish/English/Chinese was eating." Thanks for introducing me to the "morphosyntactic oddities about English ethnonyms ending in /ʃ/,/tʃ/, /z/" that I've known all my life without realizing it.
Jonathan Smith said,
January 30, 2023 @ 9:28 am
support original tweet; deletion was lame
I find it usefully head-clearing to avoid "The French [predicate]", "Chinese people [predicate]" etc. for basically the reasons stated.
Although "the French" and "the Chinese" among others seem to be rather fond of these natural kinds? :P
FWIW "The Chinese (=a single person) [predicate]" is not great here in U.S. but fine in U.K.
Taylor, Philip said,
January 30, 2023 @ 9:35 am
I am not convinced that "The Chinese (=a single person) [predicate]" [is] but fine in [the] U.K.". I could say, without hesitation, "We saw a number of Chinese eating in Happy Gathering, which is why we chose to eat there", but never "I saw a Chinese eating in Happy Gathering". Plural fine, singular considerably less so.
Timothy Rowe said,
January 30, 2023 @ 9:49 am
As one of "the college educated" I take offence at that. It should be "the college-educated". :)
Taylor, Philip said,
January 30, 2023 @ 9:52 am
"support original tweet; deletion was lame".
I find it odd that, time and time again, someone commenting on Language Log (and even at least one of the lead contributors) refer to something as being "lame". Is this not just as "disabledist" as describing someone as a spastic, a mongol, or a lunatic ? Why are these no longer regarded as acceptable whilst describing something as "lame" is still regarded as absolutely fine ?
Victor Mair said,
January 30, 2023 @ 10:06 am
I learned this use of the word from my students, many of whom are fond of it with no offense intneded to any segment of the population.
Cervantes said,
January 30, 2023 @ 10:18 am
I think the issue here is not what constructions are permissible in English,, but just the error of casual stereotyping. To say "The French [are X]" is very unlikely to be defensible as a sweeping generalization. You could say that "many French people don't like to hear their language used improperly," for example, but to say that of "the French" is inaccurate and a bit offensive. That's what the AP is getting at.
Taylor, Philip said,
January 30, 2023 @ 10:25 am
« To say "The French [are X]" is very unlikely to be defensible as a sweeping generalization ». Messrs Flanders and Swann had no problem with saying "The English [are X]", nor do I know of any Englishman who would seek to differ with them or with their terminology — "The English, the English, the English are best — I wouldn't give tuppence for all of the rest".
Taylor, Philip said,
January 30, 2023 @ 10:30 am
With respect, Victor, no offence is intended to any segment of the population (other than the person referred to) when a chav refers to someone as a spaz, but offence can most certainly be taken and would be entirely justified. I would very respectfully suggest that it might be better to seek to avoid use of the word "lame" in contexts other than describing someone (or something, e.g., a horse) that is genuinely lame.
David L said,
January 30, 2023 @ 10:36 am
It's not too hard to come up with a context in which "the lions eat meat" is fine. You might be showing someone around a zoo and explaining the diets of the various animals. The penguins eat fish, you might say, and the lions eat meat.
Nathan said,
January 30, 2023 @ 10:41 am
Skunking old, useful words because of new reinterpretations is dumb (no offense intended to those with speech difficulies). No one who has ever said, "That band is lame!" was implying that people with lessened mobility were similarly uncool, any more than blacklisting was ever a reference to melanin. Imaginary offenses are no good basis for policing innocent language.
DaveK said,
January 30, 2023 @ 12:16 pm
So are sentences like “The French are debating whether to raise the retirement age” or “The Chinese a
have been subject to stringent Covid restrictions” still allowed? Saying “the French people” or “China” doesn’t solve the generalization problem but qualifying it as “a lot of people in X” seems inaccurate.
Callum said,
January 30, 2023 @ 12:23 pm
The original advice is a bit flat because the problem is that any grouping of people by a shared property is going to have a ring of essentialism. It doesn't matter what the syntax is; dropping "the" is only going to temporarily give a soft euphemistic edge to the same reductive thoughts.
I will admit that, as a Brit, I feel unpleasant when I come across the (typically American?) use of generics for minority groups ("blacks", "gays") but I recognize it as a cultural difference and, if the speaker is bigoted (I don't know if that's more common or not), taking the generic away from them won't make a difference.
GeorgeW said,
January 30, 2023 @ 12:51 pm
It seems to me that ‘lame’ is not/less pejorative (in the US) when referring to a temporary condition, like: She broke her foot and will be lame for a couple of weeks.’ Likewise, we wouldn’t describe her as disabled.
Taylor, Philip said,
January 30, 2023 @ 1:01 pm
No, "lame" in that sense is not the least pejorative — I have (unfortunately) had to say "my horse has gone lame" on more than one occasion. But when "lame" is used to describe a band, a deletion, the Chinese "Word of the Year 2015" and so on, then the sense is quite intentionally pejorative and thereby tacitly implies that anyone (or animal) that is lame is equally as inferior as the band/deletion/word etc so described. "Spastic" wasn't pejorative in its day, any more than was "mongol", but most of us now avoid such words like the plague.
Benjamin E. Orsatti said,
January 30, 2023 @ 1:16 pm
Taylor, Philip said,
January 30, 2023 @ 1:01 pm
[…]
'Spastic' wasn't pejorative in its day, any more than was 'mongol', but most of us now avoid such words like the plague.
—
Good sir, my great^20 grandfather narrowly avoided succumbing to the Great Plague of 1312 by forswearing all sustenance but lager beer to avoid contamination. Today, we proudly bear his memory on our family crest — ursus, rampant, with bottle-opener chevron.
Long story short, watch it with your "plague" words, you barmy git.
Nathan said,
January 30, 2023 @ 1:35 pm
How dare you use git as a pejorative? That's offensive to programmers.
NSBK said,
January 30, 2023 @ 2:03 pm
@Nathan to be fair, I think the software named "git" was intentionally made so to be pejorative.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Git#Naming
I wonder what percentage of people who are (literally) lame actually take offense to its usage as "undesirable".
Perhaps there are differences in opinion from different culture groups, like maybe among those who cannot walk, The French don't care because it's an English word.
Which reminds me of the Spanish Flu and its various names…
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_flu#Associative_names
Chris Button said,
January 30, 2023 @ 2:14 pm
I don’t think we can have “a lions roared” because “a” means “one”. But it’s different in many other related languages. For example in Portuguese:
um leão a lion”
uns leões “some lions” (as opposed to the specific word for “some” rather than the plural of “a/one”: alguns leões
(“uns” being the plural of “um”)
Haamu said,
January 30, 2023 @ 2:16 pm
I suspect that part of the objection to "the [X]" expressions as dehumanizing comes from a sense that where X is an adjective rather than a noun, you're reducing a person or group of people to just one of their attributes. (There's some sort of cognitive theory underlying the objection that I'm not sure holds water, but is at least arguable.)
David Marjanović said,
January 30, 2023 @ 2:30 pm
Chinese and Portuguese have occasionally been interpreted as plurals in English, and the backformed singulars Chinee and Portuguee have made it into print.
J.W. Brewer said,
January 30, 2023 @ 2:35 pm
Re "lame," at least in AmEng I think the Euphemism Treadmill has made it so unacceptable for such a long time to refer to a mobility-impaired human (rather than a horse) that way that virtually no one perceives the "uncool" sense of "lame" as riffing on a disability-related pejorative. "Retarded" isn't quite there yet in AmEng, i.e. it has only fairly recently been excised from Official Discourse as a neutral term for persons with certain sorts of mental disabilities, so using it as a non-literal pejorative is still thought offensive in many quarters.
Obviously the nature, timing, and thoroughness of these changes will not necessarily be uniform across different English-speaking societies.
J.W. Brewer said,
January 30, 2023 @ 2:37 pm
To Haamu's point, is "French" in "the French" an adjective or a noun? I think myl is proposing an analysis as a noun, but an oddly-behaved one (although part of a quasi-regular pattern of similar nouns with the same odd behavior).
Chris Button said,
January 30, 2023 @ 2:57 pm
Presumably induced by the phonology with the fricative endings being perceived as “plural enough” in a sense (sort of like apostrophe s when making possessives)? So “Brits” works just fine.
[(myl) And "galoshes", "cheeses", "lunches", etc. also work just fine, as does "Englishes" when it refers to language varieties rather than people. The constraint is quite specific to ethnonyms in ending in /ʃ/,/tʃ/, /z/, etc., not nouns in general.]
Taylor, Philip said,
January 30, 2023 @ 3:07 pm
"Lame", as a pejorative with the sense of "unable to walk properly", is by no means dead in British English. On 23rd December 2013, "Mr H also said that his support worker came to his flat and verbally abused him, calling him 'lame'." Source.
Philip Anderson said,
January 30, 2023 @ 4:12 pm
There are phrases (or at least headlines) like “dog bites man” or “man bites dog”, which are specific, or “dog eat dog” which is generic.
Both Scot and Scotsman/-woman are possible ethnonyms, with their plurals, but an Italian man is adjective +noun.
A Chinese makes me think of a meal rather than a person; an Indian might be either, but a French doesn’t work.
Nathan said,
January 30, 2023 @ 4:23 pm
I think that in American English, using "Chinese" or "Italian" elliptically for the food works only as a mass noun; you can't add an indefinite article.
Levantine said,
January 30, 2023 @ 4:25 pm
I’m a Londoner in his early 40s. I would never say, nor can recall hearing, “the Chinese” in reference to a single Chinese person. Nor would I say, or expect to hear, “a number of Chinese” for “a number of Chinese people”.
To me, “a Chinese” (like “an Italian”, “an Indian”, etc.) refers to a meal (“I really fancy a Chinese tonight!”) and “the Chinese” to a restaurant (“Can you get some takeaway from the Chinese on your way home?”).
Brett said,
January 30, 2023 @ 5:22 pm
The fact that a person from China is rarely, if ever referred to as a "Chinese" in North American English may have something to do with the fact that there was another term—now deprecated as racist—"Chinaman."
Chas Belov said,
January 30, 2023 @ 5:32 pm
I too find the pejorative "lame" to be offensive. It's not about intent; it's about impact.
Not being British, although aware of the term from watching Monty Python, I missed the possibly intentional pejorativeness of "git" but have a similar negative reaction to the acronym of the GNU Image Manipulation Program, not to the point of being unwilling to use the program or participate in the Open Source project, but to the point of always spelling it out rather than using the acronym.
Chris Button said,
January 30, 2023 @ 5:35 pm
I wonder if that could that be the very reason though? A sort of analogical extension of the awkwardness we encounter with the possessives of personal names ending in fricatives? Just a thought…
Jerry Packard said,
January 30, 2023 @ 7:53 pm
My dad used to say his muscles were ‘lame’ when they were sore after a workout.
Seth said,
January 30, 2023 @ 9:58 pm
That tweet brought to mind that Donald Trump tends to use such a construction, in a way which struck me as uncommon for speech-making:
http://www.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/1602/24/se.03.html
"So we won the evangelicals. We won with young. We won with old. We won with highly educated. We won with poorly educated.
I love the poorly educated."
Chester Draws said,
January 31, 2023 @ 12:30 am
The original advice is a bit flat because the problem is that any grouping of people by a shared property is going to have a ring of essentialism.
In certain contexts, perhaps, but when writing history it sure saves a lot of words.
If I say that "I found the French touchy about …", have I actually avoided any essentialism by saying "I found the people of France touchy about … ?
It is all just a silly dance to show the writer is prepared to follow silly taboos in order to be seen to be kind. "People with mental illness" means exactly the same thing as "the mentally ill" — and we all know that.
No longer saying "the poor" and instead using some silly circumlocution like "people suffering from poverty" does not change the subject of *any* sentence, and is just ugly.
Philip Anderson said,
January 31, 2023 @ 1:58 am
@Chester Draws
“The mentally ill” is actually the classic example that people take issue with, since in many cases mental illness is not a permanent property, but something that comes and goes. So “people suffering from mental illness” describes their (perhaps transitory) state rather labelling them, or dividing the world into the mentally ill and the not mentally ill; on the other hand, I think it is reasonable to divide the world into the French, the Americans etc.
You obviously think it’s unimportant, but you also seem to resent other people thinking about it.
Andreas Johansson said,
January 31, 2023 @ 2:37 am
Having suffered from mental illness, I confess to being rather annoyed by the idea that I should prefer, or should have preferred, expressions like "people suffering from mental illness" over "the mentally ill".
I also fail to see how the former divides the world any less into the mentally ill and the mentally healthy – if there weren't people not suffering from mental illness, there'd be no need to speak specifically of those who do.
Taylor, Philip said,
January 31, 2023 @ 4:34 am
« “The mentally ill” is actually the classic example that people take issue with, since in many cases mental illness is not a permanent property, but something that comes and goes. So “people suffering from mental illness” describes their (perhaps transitory) state rather labelling them, or dividing the world into the mentally ill and the not mentally ill ».
Consider, on the other hand, the expression "people of colour". Colour is a permanent property, not something that comes and goes, so describing coloured people as "people of colour" does them a dis-service, suggesting as it does that their colour is merely a (perhaps transitory state) rather than a fundamental attribute. N'est-ce pas ?
Quim said,
January 31, 2023 @ 5:15 am
To make it really parallel, one would need "people suffering from colored skin" I guess, and yes, it would do a dis-service.
Jaap said,
January 31, 2023 @ 5:20 am
In the Netherlands there have been discussions in the media about our past involvement with slavery. They now avoid using the word slave, but instead use "tot slaaf gemaakte", which means "[person who has] been made a slave".
There seems to be no better alternative for this very clucky phrasing, because unfortunately the equivalent of "an enslaved [person]" is already taken – "een verslaafde" means a (drug)addict.
Neil said,
January 31, 2023 @ 5:44 am
I've noticed journalists referring to Jose Mourinho as 'the Portuguese' or Roger Federer as 'the Swiss', neither of which I would consider correct, putting those words in the English/French/Polish/Chinese category.
Mourinho: "Roma's run to the final was not all smooth, with the Portuguese coming under fire after an embarrassing 6-1 defeat by Bodo/Glimt in the group stage in October." from https://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/football/61588209
Federer: "The defeat by was even harder to accept, and this will be the first year since 2002 that the Swiss has not appeared in a Grand Slam final." from https://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/tennis/23965503
Peter Taylor said,
January 31, 2023 @ 5:50 am
I see from the second screenshot that Twitter is ahead of the curve here, calling the embassy a France government organization rather than a French one.
Michael Watts said,
January 31, 2023 @ 6:58 am
I would say that "man" doesn't require a determiner in that construction because it is a mass noun, related to mankind, and therefore "man is mortal" is parallel to "lions eat meat", not to "the lion eats meat".
Michael Watts said,
January 31, 2023 @ 7:06 am
This is another analysis that strikes me as bizarre. We can't form plurals of the words French, British, Irish, or Chinese because there is no such thing as a plural adjective in English. It's not that "the plural is the same as the singular" — there is not, and cannot be, a plural form. We need the -man or -woman suffix whenever the structure of a sentence calls for a noun.
Philip Anderson said,
January 31, 2023 @ 8:38 am
@Michael Watts
That’s true, but why are these only adjectives in English and not nouns, unlike say ‘Italian’, which can be either: an Italian/Italians vs *a French/*Frenches?
Did the phonetic inhibition of a plural prevent the nominalisation? Since benches, dishes and clutches are OK, it’s an odd inhibition. Because -ish was recognised as an adjectival ending attached to an existing ethnonym (Pole/Polish/Poland), whereas other adjectives came from a country name (Italy/Italian) with no other ethnonym?
Frank/Frankish/Francia, Angle/English/England,where Frank and Angle did not survive. Although it doesn’t work as well with Dutch.
/df said,
January 31, 2023 @ 10:41 am
@Neil
That's a trope of sports journalism where the story is typically a list of things that someone did and the stylist wants to avoid naming the person repeatedly. Other techniques use age ("the forty-two-year-old"), career history ("the eight-times Wimbledon Champion"), trivia ("the occasional cricketer"), and so on
In this context, Swiss = Swiss man/woman/person, and similarly for Portuguese, German, etc.
But for Antoine Griesman, par exemple, we have "the Frenchman", not "the French". Similarly, Spaniard and not Spanish, Turk and not Turkish, Scot, or Scotsman, and not Scottish, etc.
Chinese nowadays falls into the former category, because, whereas for French there are both Frenchman/woman, "Chinaman" has acquired a derogatory tone (as well as a technical meaning in cricket) and *Chinawoman is unknown, a singer, or a female porcelain statuette, perhaps.
Netherlanders still get the -man/woman style, although Dutchman also has some boo-status.
If English English speakers steer clear of collective "the French", it's probably because they infer some expletive between the words, such as, historically, "damn" .
Chris Button said,
January 31, 2023 @ 10:53 am
There’s a derogatory term “Frenchy” instead of “French”, which then has a plural “Frenchies”
AnthonyB said,
January 31, 2023 @ 2:37 pm
Pound in one of the Cantos: "We call all foreigners frenchies."
Rodger C said,
January 31, 2023 @ 4:31 pm
Jaap: "Enslaved persons" or "enslaved people" is the English equivalent of that.
Rodger C said,
January 31, 2023 @ 4:37 pm
Seventeenth-century English had the right idea. Cf. Milton's vulture, who
in his way lights on the barren plaines
Of Sericana, where Chineses drive
With Sails and Wind thir canie Waggons light.
Not that Milton is evidence for normal usage!
Quinn C said,
January 31, 2023 @ 5:42 pm
| Re "lame," at least in AmEng I think the Euphemism Treadmill has made it so unacceptable for such a long time to refer to a mobility-impaired human (rather than a horse) that way that virtually no one perceives the "uncool" sense of "lame" as riffing on a disability-related pejorative.
I've been wondering about that. In German, this is definitely the case – the only interpretation of "lahm" involving physicality that readily comes to mind is "being a slowpoke", otherwise it usually means "boring", "uncool". For the walking impediment, one can say that a person "lahmt", using the derived verb.
J.W. Brewer said,
January 31, 2023 @ 5:53 pm
Just to get back to "lame" in current AmEng, I asked the COCA corpus to randomly select for me 100 hits from its thousands of 1990-et-seq instances of "lame." There were two literal lame horses and a bunch of uses of the fixed-metaphor "lame duck." A (fictitious) Indian named Lame Bull and an apparent Western-U.S. toponym "the Lame Deer Agency." But no usage of lame applied in a "literal" mobility-impairment sense to human beings except in a few instances (both fiction and non-fiction) that seemed in context clearly trying to evoke an archaic/Biblical register, e.g. "golden shrines that were said to heal the sick and enliven [sic] the lame. The truth is that Patrick's arrival in Ireland …"
All the other uses, the vast majority, were the "uncool" sense. Lame excuses, lame gestures, lame attempts to cross over, lame judgments about a poem, lame news network stories, some other lame crap. And so on. Oh, but also "gold lame jackets," highlighting one of the rare instances in which diacritical marks could be helpfully disambiguating in English.
Victor Mair said,
January 31, 2023 @ 6:51 pm
Thank you, J.W. Brewer, for straightening that out. That is how all of my students use the word.
Terry K. said,
January 31, 2023 @ 7:41 pm
Taylor, Philip, January 30, 2023 @ 3:07 pm
"Lame", as a pejorative with the sense of "unable to walk properly", is by no means dead in British English. On 23rd December 2013, "Mr H also said that his support worker came to his flat and verbally abused him, calling him 'lame'." (with source link)
I'm not seeing how that's a pejorative with the sense of "unable to walk properly". Looking at the linked document, Mr H wasn't physically disabled. He had mental health issues. There's nothing to suggest the support worker who said that was doing it with a sense of "unable to walk properly".
I'd be interested to see evidence of such usage if it's out there, but this example doesn't show that.
Bloix said,
January 31, 2023 @ 9:09 pm
I ran an ngram on "lame" and found to my surprise that its literal meaning and as applied to human beings seems to have fallen away not long after 1800. I found an interrogation in a Parliamentary investigation of factory safety in that year, in which a witness is asked whether he was "lame" before a certain incident, or only afterward. After that, use of the word as a description of a person in non-fiction and literary fiction seems to dry up.
(In 1910 a novelist with the wonderful name of Warwick Deeping (who apparently was both prolific and popular – forgive my ignorance) published "The Lame Englishman," but in the text the word is never applied to the character, only to his "lame leg.")
Outside of the Deeping example, I found "lame" used frequently for horses and dogs, but by the early 19th century it's applied to people only in a certain type of non-realistic writing: Bible stories, sermons, parables, aphorisms, fairy tales, and books for children set in the distant past.
Heddwen Newton said,
February 1, 2023 @ 5:33 am
Great article, and interesting comments. I've featured it, and two others from this blog, in my newsletter: https://englishinprogress.substack.com/p/what-is-english-without-the-french With links back to here, of course. I hope that's okay!
Michael Watts said,
February 1, 2023 @ 7:29 am
This certainly can't explain any current usage, because there is intense modern resistance to the concept that a country might be named after the people who control it rather than the other way around. Americans, at least, assume by default that all ethnonyms are derived from the opaque name of the relevant country. It is a bizarre assumption, but it does happen to explain the Americas well.
Your conjecture might be relevant historically, but everyone is aware of how to use the word "French" today; if we're describing the language that modern people know, I assume we're stuck saying "French is an adjective with an associated derived noun Frenchman, whereas Italian is an adjective with an associated zero-derived noun Italian".
Taylor, Philip said,
February 1, 2023 @ 8:02 am
"French is an adjective with an associated derived noun Frenchman" — I agree that the noun "Frenchman" exists (as does the analogous noun "Frenchwoman") but I would suggest that their use is restricted in terms of domain. A sports report might say, for example, that "the Frenchman took the third set with ease", but I can't imagine most people saying (e.g.,) "I got chatting to a Frenchman on the ferry yesterday". To my mind, most would cast this as "I got chatting to a French gentleman …". "German" is unexceptionable in such context, but I think that "Frenchman" is not.
Nathan said,
February 1, 2023 @ 8:53 am
Michael Watts, I'd really like to know what you're driving at. Obviously, Americans don't assume that Mayans, Catalans, Maasai, Kurds, and Hmong are named after countries. It sounds like your "intense modern resistance" is referring to something specific, but I fail to identify it.
m said,
February 1, 2023 @ 12:35 pm
Nathan – if I understand Michael Watts correctly (and if I do, I agree), it's not that Americans think Mayans or Catalans are named after countries, but that Americans think that Slovakia or Laos are opaque placenames, and so of course the people who live there are Slovak or Lao. As opposed to the countries Slovakia and Laos having those names because they are politically dominated by Slovak and Lao people (and not the people of other ethnicities living in those countries)
Taylor, Philip said,
February 1, 2023 @ 3:16 pm
… none of which explains why we persist in calling the good folk of the Netherlands (more generally called "Holland", at least in <Br.E>) "the Dutch" … Or for that matter, why we (the British) insist on referring to the Netherlands as "Holland", which is in practice only about 20% of the whole country — it would serve us right if the Dutch insisted on referring to the United Kingdom as "Wales" in return !
Jarek Weckwerth said,
February 1, 2023 @ 4:30 pm
@m, Nathan — I think what Michael Watts means is that the term for the inhabitant needs to be derived from the country name, not vice versa. For example, Nigeria > Nigerian is OK, but Slovak > Slovakia is NOT OK; it should be Slovakia > Slovakian.
Jarek Weckwerth said,
February 1, 2023 @ 4:36 pm
@ Philip Taylor it would serve us right if the Dutch insisted on referring to the United Kingdom as "Wales" in return No, because Holland is dominant. The correct analogy is calling the UK England, which lots of people do.
wanda said,
February 2, 2023 @ 2:31 am
I have seen "lame" on lists of ableist terms. I try to avoid using it to mean "stupid or uncool" and counsel others to avoid it as well. It's a pretty sloppy word, and I don't miss it.
Philip Anderson said,
February 2, 2023 @ 3:17 am
The historical experience in the Americas has been of countries being given a name, often when gaining independence, and the nationality being derived from that (with a melting pot of indigenous people, transported slaves and other immigrants, and a colonial language). In contrast, the European experience has been included more countries that have grown up or gained independence centred around a dominant ethnic group and its language (less so in Romance world, where a linguistic continuum largely coalesced into separate dialects and languages based on political entities).
So in Europe there can be both
Philip Anderson said,
February 2, 2023 @ 4:19 am
[I sent my last message too soon]
In Eastern Europe especially, both an ethnic identity and a nationality may now exist, e.g. Serb>Serbia>Serbian, where not all Serbs live in Serbia, and not everyone living in Serbia is a Serb.
I can understand Americans imagining that English was derived from England (with an unknown Eng- in the country name), but would you analyse Finland or Thailand as anything other than “land of the Finns/Thais”?
Other problematic names, besides the Netherlands/Holland and Dutch (it was Holland when I was young, but now that is reserved for the football team in my experience):
Czechs and the Czech Republic, which is now sometimes called Czechia, but that’s a new name. “Czechian” seems rare.
Sumer and the Sumerians, where the people were named after the country, but the back formation Sumeria has now become popular. This is a pet hate of mine I confess; nobody talks about *Canadia or *Egyptia!
ajay said,
February 2, 2023 @ 5:24 am
I think what Michael Watts means is that the term for the inhabitant needs to be derived from the country name, not vice versa. For example, Nigeria > Nigerian is OK, but Slovak > Slovakia is NOT OK; it should be Slovakia > Slovakian.
In Central Asia you need to be able to do both, because there are countries like Uzbekistan which are named after their inhabitants, the Uzbeks, but not all people in Uzbekistan are Uzbeks and not all Uzbeks live in Uzbekistan. So you need to be able to differentiate between "Uzbekistani Uzbeks", "Uzbekistani Tajiks" and "Tajikistani Uzbeks".
I have even come across someone following the country-to-inhabitant rule and referring to the Afghanistanis (the inhabitants of Afghanistan) presumably by analogy with Pakistani/Pakistan.
Taylor, Philip said,
February 2, 2023 @ 6:14 am
"nobody talks about *Canadia or *Egyptia"" — I confess that I have,. more than once, referred to Hungary as *Hungaria, when speaking with the Austro-Hungarian empire in mind.
"I have even come across someone following the country-to-inhabitant rule and referring to the Afghanistanis (the inhabitants of Afghanistan)" — in the film which I watched late last night ("The Wrath of Man"), a group of former American soldiers (or possibly marines) all spoke of "Afghanis" rather than "Afghans". I don't think that they were referring to the currency …
Philip Anderson said,
February 2, 2023 @ 8:36 am
@Philip Taylor
At least Hungaria is the Latin name, although Transleithania was the name used for the Hungarian contribution to Austria-Hungary, including Croatia etc. But when I was younger, I am sure Magyar was the usual adjective, rather than Hungarian, for the language and people.
Country-to-inhabitant leads to USAnian, and inverting it must reinforce America for the country. I haven’t met an equivalent for the UK, but British arguably calls for Britain as a synonym for the UK (so Britain is bigger than Great Britain).
ajay said,
February 2, 2023 @ 8:53 am
Similarly, "Scotch" means exactly the same as "Scottish" (and indeed "Scots") – they're all adjectives meaning "from or associated with Scotland". But there is a difference between Scotch whisky and Scottish whisky. To call itself Scotch it has to be produced in Scotland and matured for at least three years in oak barrels. So all Scotch is Scottish, but you could theoretically (though I don't think any actually exists) have Scottish whisky that isn't Scotch whisky.
Rodger Cunningham said,
February 2, 2023 @ 10:48 am
a group of former American soldiers (or possibly marines) all spoke of "Afghanis" rather than "Afghans"
Maybe they wanted to avoid the impression they were talking about coverlets.
Rodger C said,
February 2, 2023 @ 10:50 am
And, I see that I've revealed my identity. Curse you, Lex Luthor!
Philip Anderson said,
February 2, 2023 @ 7:07 pm
@ajay
“Scotch” is deprecated though, except when talking about whisky or beef.There’s also Scotch tape, which isn’t from Scotland, but apparently from a pejorative use of Scotch to mean parsimonious.
Peter Taylor said,
February 3, 2023 @ 5:53 am
Philip Anderson said,
There are Greenland, Iceland and Zealand, which have nothing to do with an ethnic group. As I understand it, neither does Ireland (Éire being a designation for the physical island rather than its inhabitants). So unless you have a priori knowledge of the name of the ethnic group, I'm not sure why you would analyse Finland or Thailand as necessarily containing an ethnonym.
As an aside, there are also some examples which do have an ethnonym but require a bit of work: e.g. the former British protectorate of Bechuanaland, now Botswana, which is glossed as the land of the Tswana: you have to know something about Bantu morphology to unpack it.
V said,
February 7, 2023 @ 12:36 am
As I already pointed out on Language Hat, when Aleko Konstantinov visited the World’s Columbian Exhibition in Chicago, he says that he was asked about his nationality, and he replied “Bulgarian”. When he was informed that that’s not a valid choice — the Principality of Bulgaria was still de jure a vassal of the Ottoman Empire, even after it had unilaterally annexed an autonomous part of the Empire (Eastern Rumelia — on the other side of Bulgaria from Serbia) and defeated Serbia when it declared war on Bulgaria days(?) after in 1885.
He eventually pointed to Bulgaria on a map, and he was signed in as Turkish (not Ottoman). He might have embellished it a bit, but it says something, even if I’m not sure what exactly.
Jarek Weckwerth said,
February 7, 2023 @ 7:17 am
@V It demonstrates, loosely, that in the US nationality = citizenship (and also nation = nation state), while in Eastern Europe nationality = ethnicity (and nation = ethnic group). This is of course due, on the one hand, to the need to create a uniting myth in new states without a traditionally construed (in the European sense) nationality, e.g. in America of Africa; and on the other, to the existence of formally stateless ethnicities-nations in Eastern Europe (Bulgaria, Poland, Czechia, etc.).
V said,
February 7, 2023 @ 2:07 pm
Why Turkish rather than Ottoman, though? That's the part I think he might be embellishing, although I don't know if Turkish was a synonym for Ottoman at that time in AmE.
ajay said,
February 8, 2023 @ 5:09 am
"“Scotch” is deprecated though, except when talking about whisky or beef. There’s also Scotch tape, which isn’t from Scotland, but apparently from a pejorative use of Scotch to mean parsimonious."
I wouldn't say that "Scotch" is deprecated, it just sounds a bit out of date. Source: am Scottish, or possibly Scotch.
Or Scots! – which is another interesting one, more to do with the ethnos rather than the current political entity. You'd talk about the Scots language, Scots poetry, Scots literature (meaning not just literature in the Scots language, but literature from Scotland), Scotsmen and Scotswomen, of course, and the Scots pine (a tree) but not, I think, the Scots economy or the Scots electronics industry.
The "Scotch Tape" story is fascinating – I learned it only recently. It isn't a brand we have over here very much, perhaps for that reason (the genericised trademark is Sellotape).
Could have been worse, I suppose; the inventor could have called it Jew Tape.