emirati

[Herb Stahlke]

So is <imaaraati> native Arabic or borrowed from English "Emirati"?  If it's
native Arabic, then "Emirate" looks like a reanalysis using the English
suffix -ate, or is it, and this seems less likely, a calque?

Herb

On Sat, Mar 8, 2008 at 5:18 PM, Benjamin Zimmer <
bgzimmer at babel.ling.upenn.edu> wrote:

> ---------------------- Information from the mail header
> -----------------------
> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Benjamin Zimmer <bgzimmer at BABEL.LING.UPENN.EDU>
> Subject:      Re: emirati
>
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> On Sat, Mar 8, 2008 at 3:15 PM, Mark Mandel <thnidu at gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > 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?
> >
> > possibly influenced by "emeriti"? -- for which at first I thought it was
> a
> > typo
>
> I believe the Arabic term for someone from the Emirates is
> <imaaraati>, which is <imaara(t)> 'emirate' + the <-i> "nisba" suffix.
> So you could view "emirati" as an imprecise transliteration of that on
> the model of "emirate". Or perhaps it originated as more of an expat
> mishearing/misparsing.
>
> Earliest I find from a quick check of the databases is from 1990:
>
> -----
> 1990 _Toronto Star_ 20 Aug. A11 (Factiva) Like many Emiratis, they
> follow news of the gulf conflict constantly, tuning into local radio
> stations and to the BBC World Service on short-wave radio every hour.
> -----
>
> --Ben Zimmer
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------
> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org
>

------------------------------------------------------------
The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org