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LadyAngelika -> RE: "African American"? (2/23/2010 8:45:48 PM)
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quote:
And I will say that the people on the other side of the border.. DO say they are American. You are not quite correct in that the USA has claimed title to the continent, people I know from North and South America sometimes say American.. it is more likely that people from the USA would dismiss it, not the other countries.
We have had significantly different experiences. I don't usually quote Wikipedia as fact, but I will quote it now as it does somehow reflect a certain concensus amongst the populace:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Names_for_U.S._citizens
Different languages use different terms for citizens of the United States, who are known in English as Americans. All forms of English refer to these people as "Americans", derived from "The United States of America", but there is some linguistic ambiguity over this due to the other senses of the word American, which can also refer to people from the Americas in general. Many other languages use cognates of "American" to refer to people from the United States, but others, particularly Spanish, primarily use terms derived from "United States". There are various other local and colloquial names for Americans.
The adjective "American" originally referred to the landmass known as the Americas or America. "Americans" originally referred to the indigenous peoples of the Americas, and later to European settlers and their descendants. English use of the term "American" for people of European descent dates to the 17th century; the earliest recorded appearance is in Thomas Gage's The English-American: A New Survey of the West Indies in 1648. "American" especially applied to people in British America, and thus its use as a demonym for the United States derives by extension.
International speakers of English refer to people from the United States as "Americans", while cognates of "American" are used in many other languages. French, German, Dutch, Italian, Japanese, Chinese, Hebrew, Arabic, and Russian speakers use cognates of American (Japanese: アメリカ人 roma-ji: amerika-jin), (Russian: американец, американка), (Mandarin Chinese: pinyin- měiguórén, traditional- 美國人, simplified- 美国人) to refer to U.S. citizens. Spanish and Portuguese, however, chiefly use terms derived from Estados Unidos, the cognate of "United States" – estadounidense and estadunidense, respectively. The same linguistic ambiguity that occurs in English use of the term "American" occurs in the other European languages: to compensate for this, French (predominantly Quebec French) and Italian speakers may refer to U.S. citizens respectively as états-unien and statunitense, though this is less common, and German speakers may distinguish an Amerikaner as a US-Amerikaner. This confusion is also present in Portuguese, as people from the United States may alternatively be referred to as americanos in that language. However, in Spanish, americano chiefly refers to all people from the Western Hemisphere, and using it in the United States sense may be considered offensive; the Diccionario Panhispánico de Dudas de la Real Academia Española advises against using it in this sense.
- LA
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