Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2015 August 5

= August 5 =

"The Assyrian", "The Hun", etc
"The Assyrian came down like the wolf on the fold", as Byron put it. I'm not quite sure in this case if "The Assyrian" means the Assyrians collectively, or the commander of this army, but I've definitely seen other cases where the singular form of a demonym has been used to refer to the people collectively. The most common example I can think of is "The Hun" (used both for the actual Huns, and WWI-era Germans), and in older works I've occasionally seen "The Turk" as well. I have three questions related to this:
 * 1) Is there a term for this particular way of refering to a people?
 * 2) Are there any other peoples that are commonly refered to this way?
 * 3) All the examples I've seen have been (from the perspective of the writer) references to aggressive, marauding foreigners. Is this form ever used positively, or is it only ever used to describe threatening Others?

Iapetus (talk) 10:16, 5 August 2015 (UTC)


 * I don't know if there is a name for it, but the most common example I can think of is "the Jew". Adam Bishop (talk) 10:52, 5 August 2015 (UTC)
 * Ah, of course. I forgot that one.  And it continues the pattern of being perjorative. Iapetus (talk) 11:03, 5 August 2015 (UTC)
 * There is a certain ambivalence in the use of the definite article.  Portugal got it's name from the Latin portus (port) plus cale (whatever that means).   It's second city is Porto, "port" in Portuguese, but it is linked to the definite article, thus ha vinhos no Porto, "there are wines in Oporto".   Again, mora no Brasil, "he lives in Brazil".   Some countries take the article, some don't.   The same is seen in English.   Some Ukrainians get upset when we talk about "the Ukraine" rather than "Ukraine" as they think it condescending.   We can choose between constructions such as "the Argentine" as opposed to "Argentina". 80.43.198.251 (talk) 11:05, 5 August 2015 (UTC)
 * Here is the origin of "Portugal". ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc?

carrots→ 12:36, 5 August 2015 (UTC)
 * I don't see anything disrespectful in this.  One can easily say "the Arab", "the Frank", "the Goth", "the Moor" etc.   It's just a grammatical construction. 80.43.198.251 (talk) 11:14, 5 August 2015 (UTC)
 * Thanks, Bugs,that's very interesting.  There is a place in Portugal called Vila Nova de Gaia, vila being the Portuguese word for "town" and nova meaning "new".   It's where the wine lodges are, on the banks of the Douro ("river of gold") so it will be a suburb of Oporto. 80.43.198.251 (talk) 13:15, 5 August 2015 (UTC)
 * Actuallly, 80.43...., I think this is just about always pejorative and disrespectful—when the demonym is used, capitalized, as a noun, after "The". (When the same demonym is used as an attributive adjective, and it's a reasonable adjective form, that's not necessarily true.) One is personifying a whole people as one vague, non-specific individual, and people just don't do that when they're being respectful. You will sometimes see such a construction in sociological, historical, anthropological settings. Even here, if it's not quite outright disrespectful, there's still an air of "looking down at" the object. StevenJ81 (talk) 13:32, 5 August 2015 (UTC)
 * As with Mel Brooks' song in one of his films: "The Inquisition / Let's begin / The Inquisition / Look out, sin / We're on a mission / To convert The Jew..." ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 15:47, 5 August 2015 (UTC)
 * A more recent example is that the Argentinian forces in the 1982 Falklands War were collectively known to the British as "the Arge" (definitely not respectful). News of their surrender was transmitted by the phrase "The Arge have folded!" (still looking for a ref). Alansplodge (talk) 17:28, 5 August 2015 (UTC)


 * This is simply the collective nominalized adjective: e.g., "the rich and the poor". There's certainly no offense grievance mongering necessary.  Many languages allow the singular (Spanish El gordo "the fat one") but English usually requires a dummy one in the singular, without the one the term is usually understood as plural. μηδείς (talk) 18:28, 5 August 2015 (UTC)
 * This is an example of synecdoche, and specifically singularis pro plurali (i.e., the singular stands for the plural); see Mey, Concise Encyclopedia of Pragmatics. Mey notes that ""Particularizing synecdoches like the 'foreigner,' the 'Jew,' and the 'American' serve stereotypical generalization and essentialization, which refer in a leveling manner to a whole group of persons."  It can in principle be used to refer to any people, and it is not necessarily pejorative; Mey gives the example "The Swiss is industrious."  John M Baker (talk) 18:40, 5 August 2015 (UTC)
 * "The Swiss is industrious" would be a compliment to a Swiss national.  I don't see why a phrase like "The Eskimo are a resourceful people" should be regarded as demeaning. 80.43.198.251 (talk) 20:05, 5 August 2015 (UTC)
 * This question is about "The Eskimo is... " not about "The Eskimo are ... ". Both are grammatical, but in modern usage there's a huge difference in connotation. --ColinFine (talk)


 * Here's a newspaper article from 1934, referring a handful of times to "the aborigine", in the sense of "aborigines generally". That paternalistic-sounding usage has very much gone out of favour in Australia.  I've seen it used in relation to other indigenous peoples, and non-whites were generally fair game.  It always sounds as if what is true for one particular individual is seen to be true for their entire race.  But nobody would say that of white people, so it has an inherently racist tinge.  --   Jack of Oz   [pleasantries]  22:15, 5 August 2015 (UTC)


 * Who am I to argue with Mey? Want me to concede the point in principle? Fine. In practice, such usage is out of favor in the US, just as Jack described for Australia. I would add the following:
 * In current US usage (but not necessarily in UK usage) we would normally say "The Swiss are industrious." The verb pluralizes the subject, which takes it out of generalization we are discussing. And 80's second example (which probably needs to be "Eskimos" anyway) has (a) a plural verb and (b) explicitly describes the Eskimos as a people, again, taking it out of the generalization.
 * But want me to yield to Mey? Fine. StevenJ81 (talk) 23:31, 5 August 2015 (UTC)


 * Nobody? Seriously? You can easily find phrasings such as "the white (man)". It's no more or less racist to make generalisations using "The white/aborigine ..." rather than "Whites/aborigines ...". --Florian Blaschke (talk) 04:04, 6 August 2015 (UTC)
 * "The Englishman is a rabid nationalist." (Ralph Miliband) Oh noes, Miliband must've been racist against himself! Seriously, these sound like counter-examples to Jack's assertion to me. The racist tinge is in the generalisation, not in the metonymic phrasing (which is merely old-fashioned). --Florian Blaschke (talk) 04:15, 6 August 2015 (UTC)
 * There is one interesting case, that of the Maori (native people of New Zealand). In the Maori language, plurals are expressed in the singular form, eg. waka can be either 'canoe' or 'canoes', marae is either one ceremonial meeting ground or multiple meeting grounds. This distinction is retained when writing Maori words in formal New Zealand English documents, ie. one doesn't (or shouldn't) write 'wakas' or 'maraes'. And so it also is with 'Maori' itself, which can mean either one individual, or two, or twenty, or a whole tribe (iwi) or even the entire Maori population of the country. If one sees or hears 'the Maori' when the context means multiple individuals, it's implicit that the entire population is being referred to, and unlike the other examples on this page, there can be no connotation attached such as there might be in those cases, since the correct form is being used. Akld guy (talk) 05:29, 6 August 2015 (UTC)
 * Ralph Miliband of course was not a native Englishman and was speaking from experience I believe. --TammyMoet (talk) 08:27, 6 August 2015 (UTC)


 * Interesting. I once wrote an article on Edward Iwi, but he was not a Maori.  --   Jack of Oz   [pleasantries]  06:05, 6 August 2015 (UTC)
 * I fail to see the connection. Is that meant to be funny? Akld guy (talk) 20:45, 6 August 2015 (UTC)
 * No, I never joke about my important work for the submerged log company. It's just that "iwi" is such a curious word that it caught my eye.  I even once checked out - on this very desk - the ethnic origin of my friend Edward Iwi before writing the article, because it certainly isn't English but I couldn't pin it down.  Maori was one of the possibilities that crossed my mind at the time (see the ref desk question here).  I'm sorry for having created a diversion, but I didn't anticipate much or any response to my marginalium about Edward Iwi. I'll draw a discrete veil over this interlude.  --   Jack of Oz   [pleasantries]  21:17, 6 August 2015 (UTC)