Eli5: What determines if a nationality ends with -ese (chinese, japanese…), -an (Ghanian, Egyptian, American) or just the county itself (Thai)?
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What you’re describing are exonyms—i.e., the name given to a country or people by foreign speakers. Common suffixes used in English exonyms, which all have the same basic meaning of “of or related to,” are:
* -ish (from the old Germanic *-iskaz*, like German -isch)
* -ese (from the Latin *-ensis*, like French -aise)
* -ic (from the Latin *-icus*, like Spanish -igo)
* -an (from the Latin *-anus/-ana*, like Italian -ano/-ana)
* -i (from the Arabic *-iyy*)
You’d think there’d be a consistent pattern, like “if an exonym ends in -ish, it’s root is a German word, and if it ends in -ese, its root is a Latin word,” right? Wrong. It wouldn’t be English if it weren’t confusing and didn’t have more exceptions than rules. For instance, although Spain has roots in a Latin word (*Hispania*), its exonym is “Spanish.”
As for the origins of the exonyms themselves, they can also vary wildly. Some borrow the local endonyms (i.e., how the people refer to themselves), others are from prominent landmarks or geology, and some are the results of a millennia-long game of telephone. Here are some of the more interesting ones:
* China: believed to be from *Qin* (pronounced “chin”), the first dynasty to unify China
* Greece: from the Latin exonym for Greece, *Graecia*, which comes from the legendary founder of an ancient Greek tribe
* Egypt: from the ancient Greek *Aigyptos*, which is based on the Egyptian name for one of their cities
* India: from the Indus river, called the *Sindhu* in Sanskrit (also the root of the word “Hindu”)
* America: from the name of Italian explorer and cartographer Amerigo Vespucci
* Canada: from the Iroquoian *kanata*, meaning “village”
* Palestine: from the Latin *Palestina*, from the name for the Pelesheth/Philistines
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