Tahitian

Part of speech: adjective

Definitions

1. An individual from the island of Tahiti or relating to its culture and traditions
2. Pertaining to the flora, fauna, and cultural practices native to Tahiti and its surrounding islands
3. Describing the language spoken on Tahiti and nearby islands, as well as cultural elements unique to that region

Etymology: Tahitian is about as transparent as English adjectives get: it is simply "Tahiti" with the suffix "-an" attached, the same ending that gives us "American" or "Victorian." The island's name comes from the Tahitian language itself, so the word is a native place name run through an English suffix. The suffix has a longer ancestry than the name. It descends from a very old Indo-European element that passed into Latin as "-anus," which then reached English by way of Old French and Middle English. Its job has always been the same: to turn a place or person into a word meaning "belonging to" or "relating to" that place or people. Tahitian therefore follows the pattern of countless other "-an" adjectives, such as Hawaiian, Fijian and Samoan, and it entered English as a regular, unremarkable formation rather than a loan with a story of its own.