Reply to Referring to people from USA as "American"

Forum Index » Off-Topic

Reply to "Referring to people from USA as "American""

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]It's a pet peeve of mine.  American to describe a citizen of the USA is inaccurate.  Perhaps specifying USA would be helpful.

[/quote]

But America is in our name, not in the other's names. [/quote]

Exactly, many countries that have political descriptors in the official title "People's Republic of ..." like United States of ...." or United ____ States" do not use the political description in casual English discourse, just the last part, such as China, Mexico, etc. So following the same usage pattern, the United States of America is shortened to America. When a distinction NEEDS to be made for clarity, people make it. In the Olympics: "U.S.A!" and the US Team or the Athlete from the US or the US Athletes -- but that doesn't work in English when trying to use one word to group all citizens. Then the only choice in English currently is Americans. So, its pretty much just English linguistics that we're stuck with from 1776 (which does not match the Spanish linguistics), not some major arrogant political statement of the current century.

So, in the English language, we have The Americas (all the continents grouped), North America, Central America, and South America, and America (which is 1) the shortened form of USA, which is one of the countries in North America, AND 2) a synonym for The Americas, a usage which is linguistically frowned upon due to lack of clarity). I suppose what upsets people is that, while one of the several correct connotations of the word American is "inhabitant of one of the continents in the Americas" it is rarely used that way in the U.S., because it is the weaker, less clear connotation, and would be marked as such by a grammar teacher unless the context were made explicit in the body of the text.

As for the translation issue, any translator will tell you, translations are rarely literal word-for-word, rather interpretation and usage must be taken into account. So the English translation of the Spanish word for "United Stateser" is "American," an English word that has more than one correct connotation and usage in an English dictionary. As such, the correct translation of the word "American" into Spanish will depend on how the world was being used in English, and the translator will choose the Spanish word that matches the correct English connotation.[/quote]

Options

	Disable HTML in this message
	Disable BB Code in this message
	Disable smilies in this message

Review message

Search Recent Topics Hottest Topics