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Linguistic nit-picking on a Friday afternoon: I noticed this phrase over at the JavaPolis 06 website (a login is required):
17 299 JavaPolians registered
And I started wondering why JavaPolian, why not JavaPolitans?
After all, people living in a metropolis are metropolitans or have metropolitan characteristics.
The same applies for people from Minneapolis.
Maybe the ending for metropolis is different in French or Flemish… And what about the inhabitants of Atlantis, what are they called?
As you can see, the benefits of a linguistics degree are endless.
More linguistic nit-picking available here.
One Comment
It seems that people often confuse -ian and -itan.
-ian would be like an identifier for e.g. an occupation or a state of being of a peron, “librarian” & “sectarian”.
-itan would define a person’s location or geographic affiliation: “metropolitan”, “cosmopolitan”.
In this case, JavaPolis would have mixed up semantics.
A quick search for “metropolian” revealed that English speakers seem to ignore this rule.
French ending is “Metropolitain” (etymology give “metropolitanus” for latin).
So…people just don’t know their grammar, it seems? But hey…they did a good coding job on the site. Compensates. Haha.