RE: the can of worms is truly open revisited

["Patricia M. Godfrey" PriscaMG@xxxxxxxx]

"David B. Kronenfeld"  wrote:
≪ "I am a Danish." vs. "I am Danish." seems to more or less parallel
the German Berliner bit. ≫

Actually, there is a further refinement, in that English sometimes has
separate nouns and adjectives (as in He is a Dane, they are Danes,
he/she/it is Danish) and sometimes has to make do with a single word
used in all constructions: he is French, they are French, he is a
Frenchman, she is a Frenchwoman, the painting is French.

As for Scots, Scotch, scotch, we must distinguish English from Scots
usage. The Scots say: I am a Scot, they are Scots, we all speak Scots.
(Or at least, they used to. Language changes so fast nowadays that one
cannot keep up with it. See below.)

So looking for English analogies only muddies the waters. English,
thanks to its dual heritage (Germanic foundation, but enormous
proportion of Latin vocabulary) is far richer in synonyms and
alternative ways to say things than other languages.

Having said that, I think a parallel (not an analogy) from English may
throw some light on the issue. During my lifetime, native English
speakers have become increasingly uncertain about the use of the
definite article. Some naive speakers find something insulting and
derogatory in its use; I was once practically accused of anti-Semitism
for prefixing "the" to the word "Jews" where I felt idiom demanded it.
And of course there is the famous instance of Ukraine demanding that it
not be called "the Ukraine" in English, because the Ukrainians thought
that denoted less than sovereign status. (It doesn't of course; use or
omission of the definite article before the name of a geopolitical
entity has nothing to do with the rank of the entity and everything to
do with the morphology of its name.)

So I suspect that the form with ein may be an older, now somewhat
bookish (Wolfgang should know that those are complimentary terms in my
vocabulary) idiom, unfamiliar to people raised on Der Spiegel. What does
Luther's Bible (to which I appeal not as Holy Writ but simply as a
German classic, of formative influence on the modern language, and one
whose content is familiar to me through Latin and English translations
of the same Hebrew and Greek originals) have at the following places?
Acts 22:25-29 (repeated reference to Paul's being "a Roman citizen");
Acts 23:6 (I am a Pharisee); Mark 14:70 (thou art a Galilean); Luke 23:6
(whether the man was a Galilean)?
Or how about this? Was W.S. Gilbert ever translated into German? If so,
how does the number in _H.M.S. Pinafore_ go (Act II): "He is an
Englishman..for he might have been a Roosian, A French, or Turk, or
Proosian...." I'd like to see a current translation versus an older
one--say more than 50 years old.

By the by, I have a German-French dictionary, copyright Brunswick,
Verlag George [sic] Westermann, 1851; it has no entry for Berliner, but
has one for die Berline, the horse-drawn carriage called even in English
a berline. Could the proliferation of names of comestibles identical in
form with the terms denoting inhabitants of places (Frankfurter,
Hamburger, Berliner, etc.) have _caused_ a change in idiom, by which the
 indefinite article was omitted when the sense is "inhabitant", to
prevent such confusion?

Emery Snyder, have you any light to throw on this?

Patricia M. Godfrey