Re: CHAT: silly names, prepositions

Jesse Bangs wrote:
>Andreas Johansson sikayal:
>
> > I don't think anybody was even think about trying to force anyone
>anything.
> > However, I, and it seems like I'm not alone, find it somewhat ambiguious
>to
> > use "Americans" for "US citizens" since the word "Americans" looks like
>it
> > refers to (any) inhabitants of the Americas, and is indeed sometimes so
> > used.
>
>No, it's not!  The fact remains that, ambiguous or not, the term
>"American" is virtually always understood to refer to someone from the US.
"Virtually always" isn't the same as "always". Also, when used as a common
adjective, the word fairly frequently refer to the continents. Eg "American
countries", "the first Americans" as a term for those Clovis people, "The
Panamerican Highway", "American" in certain names of animals and plants.

[snip]
>
>Furthermore, the origin of the term "American" is not deliberately
>arrogant.  There simply isn't any other common term available for
>describing citizens of the US, and so "American" gets used.  Accusing
>Americans of arrogance for this is unfair and rediculous, because
>Americans can't change it and never meant anything by it in the first
>place.
Did I accuse Americans of being arrogant?
>
> > Also, even tho' I'm not a native speaker, I do consider English to be
>"my"
> > language,
>
><sarcasm> But *I'm* not from England and *I* speak English, too!  I demand
>that those arrogant, imperialist Angles stop giving their name to all of
>our language.  We should call it Anglo-Australio-Uso-Canadian, so that
>everyone gets their share! </sarcasm>
If you want to refer to it as Anglo-Australio-Uso-Canadian (possibly
offending all those Scots, Irish, South Africans, other Africans etc etc who
also speak it), well that's fine by me. It's your lang too.
>
>This is insane.  Just like the term "American", the name "English" comes
>from long in the past and is now so entrenched that to rail against it is
>pointless.  Those that insist on calling it a symbol of arrogance simply
>have a chip on their shoulders and should get over it.
It's always posssible to change names. Look at the Soviets ... Seriously, I
have little hope that the term "American" will be changed in the forseeable
future. If it does get changed, the reason will likely be some sort of
catastrophe - internal collapse or external conquest - that I wouldn't want
to see. I don't even see it as a "symbol of arrogance". But none of that
stops me thinking it's a rather unfortunate name that causes some
unnecessary complication.

                                                        Andreas

PS If you think I've got some special bias against the term "American" and
the use of "America" for the USA, tere's a few other names and terms I also
dislike. I've already mentioned that I dislike seeing "Europe" used for the
EU. The distinction between "South Africa" and "southern Africa" sometimes
causes trouble. The Central African Republic has a somewhat inconvenient
names as there's quite a lot of republics in Central Africa. Do "Timorese"
refer to anyone/-thing from Timor or just form East Timor?
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