A Linguistic Challenge

Thande

Donor
Most Germanic and Romance languages have cognate endings for the adjective describing a country/people.

For example,

English uses -ish or -ese;
German uses -isch;
French uses -ais, -ois etc;
Spanish and Portuguese use -es.

The challenge here is to concoct a fictional scenario in which a Germanic or Romance language uses -ases as its suffix, as in the old AH.com joke Sudanases for Sudanese and Chineases for Chinese. ;)
 
I don't want to sound pedantic here, Thande, but English also uses "-ian".

But "-ases"? I would say that in English, get it into poetry or have Shakespeare use it, and voilà!:D
 

Susano

Banned
But that's not a cognate, is it? :rolleyes: Read the post.

Im afraid it is cognate to German -isch at least, as the German country ending -ien is cognate to English -ia - example: Rumänien/Romania - adjective being Rumänisch and Romanian.

But nontheless, that was of course just your example, so it isnt important.
As for the Challenge... err... somehow I cant see any social events triggering word shifts into a specific direction, so its an odd challenge. Its kinda like "Challenge: Create a Butterfly Effect" ;)
 

Thande

Donor
But nontheless, that was of course just your example, so it isnt important.
As for the Challenge... err... somehow I cant see any social events triggering word shifts into a specific direction, so its an odd challenge. Its kinda like "Challenge: Create a Butterfly Effect" ;)
This is mainly one for experts like Leo; I'm hoping for something like "well, if the Catalans settle in Occitania instead and are ruled over by the Lombards for X, Y and Z influence, then..."
 

Leo Caesius

Banned
It's certainly not impossible. English does have a tendency to borrow derivational morphemes from other languages and use them productively.

So, here's what we need:

A language that has this morpheme (or, given the vagaraties of English orthography, something close enough for government work, like French -ais);

A contact situation in which English borrows words bearing this suffix;

An analogy that would allow for the loan morpheme to be applied to neologisms.

This new derivational morpheme must have some significance that sets it apart from similar morphemes, thereby allowing it to fill a niche in the lexicon.
 

Thande

Donor
It's certainly not impossible. English does have a tendency to borrow derivational morphemes from other languages and use them productively.

So, here's what we need:

A language that has this morpheme (or, given the vagaraties of English orthography, something close enough for government work, like French -ais);

A contact situation in which English borrows words bearing this suffix;

An analogy that would allow for the loan morpheme to be applied to neologisms.

This new derivational morpheme must have some significance that sets it apart from similar morphemes, thereby allowing it to fill a niche in the lexicon.

My only thought is of a mainly Spanish or Portuguese-based pidgin that takes the French word for a people (e.g. anglais) but fails to recognise that the suffix is already there, so adds the Spanish or Portuguese one, for anglaises. Then, when that's transliterated into English, it could end up as e.g. Englases.
 
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