Actually it’s a globally-known shopping business named after the afore mentioned globally known tourism business. Which I think is an important point.
If call your software company Barcelona, then you sort of need to accept that you aren’t on an equal footing when it comes to name ownership with the place you named your company after no matter how big you get.
That might be true, but I don't think it's a foregone conclusion. I think it's entirely possible that depending on how you measure it, Amazon the company has overtaken all the above.
Edit: And to be slightly less waffling, I think it's entirely possible it's overtaken them in some of the most obvious ways to measure, such as (global) public consciousness and word association.
I'm pretty sure the Amazon (river/basin) will still be there, and will still be one of the earth's great geographical features; I hope even the Amazon rainforest will still be noteworthy on a world scale.
I'm sure we can choose a specific metric to make the Amazon geographic area win, just as we can for any of the others in this comparison, but picking the metric to match the outcome we want doesn't seem the right way to go either.
I can definitely see cases for all of them, and I don't know the right metric by which to judge. That does make this an interesting case IMO, as the likelihood of the losers to be upset is high (except maybe Greek mythology, since I don't think they have a strong lobby on their side).
So, multiple peoples?
Mr. Bezos could have made up his own word rather than trying to steal one.
Would be an interesting poll, broken down by region, but speaking for myself if you say 'Amazon' to me without context, I'll immediately think of the company.
Similarly 'twitter' in older literature throws me off for a second. I'd bet it's plummetted in usage in recent years.
It's just about familiarity - I use some part of Amazon the company almost every day, but have no ties to _the_ Amazon, nor see it as frequently in news items.
I am not arguing for any side, but I do acknowledge that the Amazonian community's right to the name rests on a very good argument.
Which goes back to crazygringo's point:
>Because if it were for locals, it would be .amazonia and .amazonas. (Similarly to how Germany is .de, not .gr or something like that.)
I'm also not arguing for any side, but I don't think your "bond" argument is particularly convincing. Namely, it strikes me as too vague in the general case and thus too hard to adjucate. The things you use to nail it down (tribe, home, history) are specific to this case, but don't generalize well. Even if you were able to address those problems, it doesn't compell me to think that these people deserve the English name for the geography in question (perhaps especially if those people don't really identify with the geography in question, but rather as nations who happen to live in that geography?).
In any case, it's a puzzling and interesting question.
Again, it's familiarity, and that's just me personally. I do like apples, but other than using a Mac for work I don't have any Apple gear. I wouldn't be surprised to hear that someone else first pictured iPhones etc.
The spanish conquistadores were so impressed by the fact that the indigenous women fought together with the men that they started calling the place the "forest of the Amazons", after the old Greek myth. The name stuck. But there was never an actual tribe called the "Amazons".
Things we associate with a place, or people, a culture, or a nation can at times be surprisingly recent or not quite as we might assume or have origins we might not expect. Food in particular that gets associated with one group of people often has origins in far off places that you might not expect. Key aspects of those might have only recently been used and their origins might be the other side of the world. So what is authentic and who really "owns" that thing when everyone is combining and experimenting?
I think of blue jeans or even just denim as an American thing but... http://www.artnet.com/magazineus/reviews/karlins/master-of-b...
No, it was named after the Amazon river, not anything to do with tourism around the Amazon river.
We could have a long debate about whether the modern country of Greece has any relationship to the ancient Greek city-states, but I think that's entirely beside the point.
Here's some actual pedantry: the Amazons weren't goddesses. They were a tribe of human warriors.
> All Themyscirian Amazons possess various degrees of superhuman strength, speed, stamina and extraordinarily acute senses and the ability to glide on aircurrents. ... Themyscirian Amazons also possess immortality that allows them to live indefinitely in a youthful form.... Themyscirian Amazons also possess the ability to relieve their bodies of physical injury and toxins by becoming one with the Earth's soil and then reforming their bodies whole again.
I bought a bag of King Arthur-brand flour the other day. Should Great Britain be allowed to take over their domain name?
Furthermore, regions like this that have an official tld get a two letter tld like .eu for European Union. If they wanted to start an Amazonian Union and get a tld for it, they should! (maybe ".aa")