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Comment by ceratin6 | Hacker News Reader

How should one distinguish Georgia as U.S. State vs. eastern European country?

It’s one of the few contextual proper names I’ve not ever seen have to be differentiated, though it seems it would need to be when speaking to a global audience.

For that matter, as an author, under what circumstance should you need to differentiate, if all audience is global?

Is it adequate to assume that since Google filters and has been filtering content by language for years, that Georgia in search results and relevant pages is almost always the Georgia they seek?

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As someone in western europe, if it's non-US media it's probably Georgia the country, which is merely mentioned "rarely" as opposed to "only in us election week". If it's US media, it's probably Georgia the state. That said, countries are generally considered more important, so if it's not obvious you're talking about the US, I think the onus would be on people referring to Georgia, USA to specify.

Most countries are just not interested in internal divisions of other countries so it doesn't come up often. Just like I don't have the need to distinguish Munster (Ireland) and Münster (Germany) even though the latter often loses its umlaut in English text, or run into confusion between Northern Territory (Australia) and Northwest Territory (Canada). And the English language isn't short context sensitive words in other areas too, the most frequent example being "read" vs "read".

So imagine my surprise when staying with friends of my wife in Münster, they had never heard of Muenster cheese. They assured me that it must come from Munster in Ireland because Americans commonly confuse the two. But I was not convinced because the ‘ue’ in the spelling indicated a transliteration from ‘ü’. It was pre-Wikipedia, but luckily our hosts had a copy of ‘Das großes Buch vom Käse’ which let us know we were both wrong. Apparently there is also an Alsatian village named Munster with a distinctive cheese recreated by emigrants to the US.

In the EU the Munster cheese you'll find is generally from Alsace, it's protected (PDO).

I've lived in Georgia (the U.S. state) my whole life, and when I read "Georgian" as an adjective, I usually assume it means Georgia the country. People here typically use "Georgian" only as a noun to refer to a resident of the state. In adjective form, you usually just hear "Georgia" (e.g., Georgia coast, Georgia pines).

I wrote this elsewhere as an expanded form of my other comment here:

In the pictured headline, if "Georgian African American newspapers" is using "Georgian" as a demonym, then it means newspapers published by African Americans from Georgia.

But if the headline is using "Georgian" as an adjective, then lacking hyphenation, it's ambiguous whether it means newspapers published by African Americans from Georgia /or/ newspapers published in Georgia by African Americans.

We rarely use the adjectival form of U.S. states ("Georgia Peaches", not "Georgian Peaches"), so I found the headline a little garden path and initially started parsing it as if it were referring to the country of Georgia.

Then, right below the headline, the text reads "Georgia African American newspapers" which isn't ambiguous and means newspapers published in Georgia by African Americans. That's confirmed by the rest of the article.

Of course, the African Americans in question were likely also from Georgia, so to be pedantic, it's Georgian African American Georgia newspapers.

(I doubt any African Americans from Georgia emigrated to the Russian Empire at the time, otherwise we could be talking about African American Georgian Russian Georgia newspapers ... or something.)

Anyway if I were the headline writer, I think I would have used "African American Georgia newspapers..."

I was born in Georgia-the-US-State, and yet I stumbled a bit on the headline, parsing it as Tblisi-not-Atlanta.

Your careful analysis might explain my brain. (In this particular case. If that is even possible, because my brain...)

Agreed, as an midwestern American. Hearing "Georgian", I would think of the country, then the Georgian era (especially regarding architecture) and only then the state.

Yeah, had it said "Georgia" instead I would not have had the same confusion OP had.

I guess it's one of those unspoken rules we don't know we know.

I did think about that issue. In this case, the word Georgian is immediately followed by the phrase African American in the title. That should be sufficient to make it clear it's the US state we are talking about, not the country.

I found it a little garden path. I think "African American Georgia newspapers from..." is slightly clearer.

That slightly alters the meaning by not using the demonym: newspapers published by African Americans from Georgia vs newspapers published in Georgia by African Americans.

I guess you could also go with African American Georgian Georgia newspapers to be explicit that it's newspapers published in Georgia by African Americans from Georgia.

Sorry, I guess I have Georgia on my mind now.

That's good feedback. I also stumbled a bit on the word Georgian and I am originally from Georgia.

To me, that calls to mind Georgian architecture, not stuff from the state of Georgia.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgian_architecture

But the reality is that HN has some guidelines concerning titles (plus a character limit). So I did the best I could within the constraints as I best understand them, but I will certainly keep your remarks here in mind for any future titling challenges.

> That's good feedback. I also stumbled a bit on the word Georgian and I am originally from Georgia.

WHICH GEORGIA?! I swear people in this thread are writing specifically to make the rest of us mad :P

The one with the Tybee bomb.

There may have been African Americans or at least some of African heritage in Georgia of eastern Europe during that time period[1] and a little later[2].

[1]- https://www.blackpast.org/global-african-history/black-prese...

[2]- https://www.wilsoncenter.org/blog-post/black-skin-red-land-a...

Right, but I would bet that even today African Americans make up a very small miniority of people of African heritage in the country of Georgia and African Americans were certainly not numerous enough there in the 1890s to have their own newspapers.

This is not wrong if you consider Abkhazia part of Georgia. There are definitely recorded African descent families speaking Abkhaz and pictured in Abkhaz clothing. You are being unfairly downvoted.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abkhazians_of_African_descen...

Are they American ex-patriots?

I've noticed that in desperately searching for the polite term to refer to local black people, a lot of Europeans and Asians accidentally and humorously land on "African-American."

No but their going to America was not out of the realm of possibility if they had Russian documents. I’m just saying it’s not as facially impossible as it sounds

Well, in the context of "Georgian African American" I didn't have any trouble. I'm surprised you did, as the other Georgia isn't currently, and has never in the past, been "American"

Georgian to me especially in this context originally meant the period.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgian_era

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