[Lexicog] -ish suffixes

[Peter Kirk]

On 27/03/2005 21:54, John Roberts wrote:

>... British and Scottish
>describe nationalities but not languages while Flemish and Kurdish describe
>languages but not nationalities. ...
>

These are not technically nationalities in the modern sense (which would
be anachronistic for words which mostly predate the modern nation state
system), but they are probably ethnicities at least by self-perception.
While "Flemish" in this sense is obsolete, it is often written e.g. that
many Flemish weavers settled in East Anglia in the later Middle Ages.
The original noun form was "Fleming", with the -ing suffix (in the Old
Germanic sense of "people") replaced by -ish.

But then there are also Cornish, Kentish and Yiddish (thank you, Hayim,
for this one); also Lettish which became a nationality again only in
1991 (although Latvian is the preferred form). The Cornish still
consider themselves ethnically distinct, but the Kentish don't, so maybe
this latter word is simply a holdover from Kentish dialect which may
have used -ish more widely. Well, if Kentish is a loan word from
Kentish, I suppose Yiddish is a loan word from Yiddish - but Cornish is
not a loan word from Cornish, which is not Germanic and so I don't
suppose has this -ish suffix.

>... The terms Finnish, Swedish and English just
>happen to do both.
>
>

It seems to me that the basic meaning of this sense of -ish is to denote
an ethnicity, and is an adjective rather than a noun (although like many
English adjective it can form a collective noun, "the Swedish" like "the
blind"). But many of these words have come to denote languages, and turn
into nouns, by abbreviation, e.g. "English" is simply an abbrevation of
"the English language".

Ron suggests that -ish is always added to a proper noun for the citizen
- which I would change to "member of the ethnic group". But the
proper(-ish) noun is not always separately attested. For England, the
closest is Angle but the link has long been lost. Brit is a recent
back-formation from British, but there is Briton. But there is no
related proper noun for Irish or Cornish (except for Irishman/woman and
Cornishman/woman, and derivations cannot be recursive!), nor Welsh which
is presumably a contracted -ish form, nor Kentish.

Ron also wrote:

>However the other meaning of
>Swedish (the language) is a proper noun: '*He speaks a good Swedish.'
>

But "He speaks good Swedish" is OK, so this has the characteristics more
of a collective, which cannot be individualised, rather than a proper noun.

Meanwhile "finish", "vanish" and "polish" in the non-ethnic sense are
presumably from French, as they all I think relate to a rare group of
French verbs with stems ending in -iss.

By the way isn't bully beef so called because it is prototypically from
a bull?

--
Peter Kirk
peter at qaya.org (personal)
peterkirk at qaya.org (work)
http://www.qaya.org/



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