emirati

[Mark Mandel]

possibly influenced by "emeriti"? -- for which at first I thought it was a
typo

On Fri, Mar 7, 2008 at 10:51 PM, Herb Stahlke <hfwstahlke at gmail.com> wrote:

> I came across "Emirati" today for the first time as a term for citizens of
> United Arab Emirates.  It gets 4.93m hits on Google, so I'm obviously
> behind
> the wave.  An Arabic root, amir "commander", from which we ultimately get
> "admiral," combined with the Latinate -ate suffix as in "professorate" or
> "syndicate" plus the suffix -i borrowed from Arabic where it's an
> adjectival
> marker as in "Baghdadi."  Its singular use is attested by the blogsite
> name
> "An Emirati's thoughts" http://aethoughts.blogspot.com/.   Its plural is
> "Emiratis" (56,600 hits)
> http://www.arabnews.com/?page=4&section=0&article=106065&d=25&m=1&y=2008.
> It's obviously an analogical form, but is this
> Arabic+Latinate+Arabic(+English) morphological pattern found in other
> forms,
> or is Emirati(s) unique?
>
> Herb
>
> --
Mark Mandel

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