Word Formation by Shortening and Affixation

The term Sudetens, extremely frequent in the news columns of 1938, did not exist before that year. There had existed in English only the 'Sudetes,' the 'Sudeten,' the 'Sudetic Mountains,' and the originally German 'Sudetengebirge,' all terms identifying a group of mountains and never anything else. Therefore, when those acquainted with Central Europe read for the first time about the Sudetens, they naturally assumed that a 'corrupted' form-Sudeten, equipped with the suffix -s of so many English names of mountain chains-referred to that range, and they were just as astonished at reading about 'the wishes of the Sudetens' as they would have been at reading about the wishes of the Rockies or the Catskills. The word suddenly meant people, not mountains, and it was apparently a plural of a singular that so far did not exist: on August 9, 1938, the New York Times reported that a Sudeten had been killed. But even so one could wonder why the word also signified, as I propose to show, many people who had nothing to do with the Sudeten Mountains area and, on the other hand, excluded from its meaning part of the inhabitants of these districts

Linguistics · Word (group theory · Word formation · Linguistics, Language Diversity, and Identity · History · Philosophy