"Nadav Har'El" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
> It's interesting how Israelis take for granted that we should be called
> "Israeli" and not "Israelian".
I rather suspect that Anglo-Saxons decided that. The French, as usual,
beg to differ.
> If you think about it for a moment, you'll
> see that most nationalities end with "an", although there are a lot of
> weird cases (compare canadIAN, americAN, peruVIAN, french, german, englISH,
> JapanESE, etc.), but no nationality ends with an "i" like "Israeli"
> does.
Yemeni, Saudi, Iraqi, Pakistani. Are we going to make geographical
or ethnic speculations?
There are other, even more weird, cases, like Greek, Cypriot, Chech,
Filippino [sic! note the spelling that is different from the
country's], Basque, and - if you think a bit - Catalan ;-). You
mentioned French yourself, but they always try stand out, don't they?
Actually, German doesn't fit the -an pattern either. ;-)
You can easily get carried away with Sioux, Delaware, or -- getting
closer to topic -- Apache. ;-)
As usual in languages, there are patterns and rules, and there are
exceptions. English is full of exceptions, but Israeli sounds more
like a pattern to me.
--
Oleg Goldshmidt | [EMAIL PROTECTED]
"... We work by wit, and not by witchcraft;
And wit depends on dilatory time." [Shakespeare]
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