Wednesday, December 26, 2018

Facing your demonimos


We all have demons with which we must deal. And when you talk about the demons behind our language, one of those who crawl more often than we think is the way to correctly write or tell demoniac or name in a translation project or an interpretation session. In Spanish, there are many ways to write a generalities. We rely on a series of suffixes to refer properly to the nationality of a person, place of origin, or to refer to the inhabitants of a place.

As with most of the grammatical rules, there are always exceptions when it comes to the creation of a gentile. Some of these suffixes are: Anon / to (as in Bolivian/a, Romano/a),-ion / to (as in Parisian/a, Argentine/a), eon/a (as in Brazilian/a, Caracas/a)-ens (as in Coats Rice, Canadian), is / that (French / sea, Danish / that),-eon / to (Slovenian, Chilean / )-i (as in Saudi, Bengali) e - its (Vietnamese, Muscovite). Then come the irregular or exceptions to the rule: Monaco / (from Monaco), Paraguayan/a, Belgian, Russian, Swedish/a, for example.
Now, the real demons appear when we look for the demon ism or adjective for people from a specific city. This is difficult for the majority of the citizens of countries where the same language is spoken so imagine reach them when a translation is made, or provide with the name at the time during a session of interpretation. A although that might not be so common saying "I'm a Birmingham" (from Birmingham, Alabama), are terms that we have to be aware under certain circumstances. These are just some of them: in Latin America, you memos to the Asuncion (Asuncion, Paraguay), from (from San Juan, Puerto Rico), San Juan (of San Juan, Argentina), Josefina (San Jose ed Coats Rita) and the Managua (neutral use for the inhabitants of the) namesake city).
In Europe they have it so easy either. We have the Lisbon (from Lisbon), Liverpudlians/as (to give you a clue, the Beatles are Liverpudlian), holiness (from Stockholm), so iota (of... Yes, Sofia, Bulgaria).
It seems as if the demon isms were a minefield, but are necessary demons that we have to know and be on our side if the final battle happens.