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Comment by thaumasiotes | Hacker News Reader

There's nothing incorrect about the fact that "American" refers specifically to the USA. Compare this wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Americans

> Americans are the citizens and nationals of the United States of America.

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Okay, TIL. However, if you look at the "language versions" of that Wikipedia page, that also explains my confusion:

Deutsch: "US-Amerikaner" Español: "Estadounidense" Italiano: "Statunitensi" ...

so there are plenty of languages that do make a distinction between "American living on the American continent(s)" and "American from the US". Full disclosure: I'm from Germany...

Minor quible, but most spanish speakers I know refer to people from the USA as Americanos. Estadounidenses gets used as part of legalese and in the context of non US nationalism.

I'm a native Spanish speaker and most, if not all, people I know use "Estadounidenses" or "yankees" (colloquially). I do see "Americanos" used in translated media though.

Fun fact: an "Americano" also means an espresso with water added

Which is borrowed from Italian, not Spanish.

One more data point. In my experience in Spain people definitely use estadounidense outside of legal documents. You could hear, or read, "la artista estadounidense", for instance.

"Americano" is used too, as well as "afroamericano" (not "afroestadounidense").

Ditto for Italian: "Americani" is much more common than "Statunitensi".

It's funny: when Americans realize we're saying the name of a foreign city badly, like Peking for Beijing, Canton for Guangzhou, and others, we move to assimilate our naming to that of the natives. Why is it that everyone insists that we refer to ourselves by the wrong name? Is it even possible for us to be wrong about what we call ourselves?

They're not insisting anything though right? They've only said it's funny and confusing. That you consider them to be insisting is interesting. I'm British so I've never been on the receiving end of any of that insistence, but from your response I assume it must happen frequently.

What I really want to contribute here though is that your "we" from "what we call ourselves" doesn't include me. Like a lot of people outside the US, English is my native language and calling Americans Americans has always given me pause for thought. So I put it back to you:

Is it even possible for us to be wrong about what we call you?

Just as a note: Peking was a corruption by French missionaries, not Americans.

In general, these kinds of errors come from historical limitations: orthography, linguistics, &c. At minimum, it’s respectful to try to adapt based on our better, contemporary understanding.

> Just as a note: Peking was a corruption by French missionaries, not Americans.

What? Peking wasn't a corruption at all. It accurately reflects the pronunciation encountered by... most Europeans who interacted with Chinese. Mandarin received official status in the 20th century.

>There's nothing incorrect about the fact that "American" refers specifically to the USA. Compare this wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Americans > Americans are the citizens and nationals of the United States of America.

Also from wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American :

American, something of, from, or related to the Americas, also known as "America"

And https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Americas :

The Americas, which are sometimes collectively called America, are a landmass comprising the totality of North and South America.

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