2 ms·

Indeed I can't find in Polish any other singular -anin not derived from place, But słowianin in plural is słowianie, and there's lots of -anie words not derived

by ajuc 5y ago

Indeed I can't find in Polish any other singular -anin not derived from place, But słowianin in plural is słowianie, and there's lots of -anie words not derived from places. For example abstract nouns formed from verbs, like: pisanie (writing) from pisać (to write) palenie (smoking) from palić (to burn) śniadanie (breakfast) from archaic śniadać (to eat) jedzenie (food) from modern jeść (to eat) bieganie (running) from biec (to run) etc. There's easily hundreds of these. Then it would be słowianie (abstract noun for people who can talk) from archaic słowić (to express in words) The only weird thing would be that słowianie is plural and all of the other -anie nouns made from verbs are singular.

schoen 5y ago
That seems pretty strong, but Wiktionary analyzes these two kinds of -anie as different suffixes https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/-anie#Polish https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/-anie#Polish without stating whether they're etymologically related. It would also be good to know whether both exist in other Slavic languages. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/-anin#Polish https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/-anin#Polish has another example in Serbo-Croatian, which in turn has a different suffix corresponding to Polish -anie: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/-anje#Serbo-Croatian https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/-anje#Serbo-Croatian I don't know any of these languages, so I don't have any intuitions about this.