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Comment by meiraleal | Hacker News Reader

Nobody would be taken seriously calling the US "America" in South America.

That's fine. You have your terminology and others have theirs.

It might (not) surprise you to learn that what I call Cyprus is called "Zypern" by Germans and there are a lot more copper related names for the place.

Closer to my home, what I call London is Londres in France and London in German. The city in question was named by a bunch of what would become Italians (Romans) - Londinium was named by a murderous bunch of colonial invaders.

I have insinuated an awful lot from your comment and "replied" to those insinuations as best I can.

I am somebody and I use the term America routinely to describe the USA and the term Americas for the entire continent. North America is US + CA and Southern America is Brazil, Argentina, Peru, Paraguay, Chile, Uruguay and ... oh there are rather a lot more. There is also Central America which is the countries that join the north to the south.

I get that you have an axe to grind about which America is which and who owns which name. I have some sympathy for Brazil getting pissed off about Amazon (the company) too.

I try to understand all points of view - its quite interesting.

> I have some sympathy for Brazil getting pissed off about Amazon (the company) too.

I never met a Brazilian that cares about it tho. There was a big national uproar a few decades ago when some Japanese company tried to patent the use of the Açaí fruit and trademark.

now about America and Americans. South Americans and North Americans are as much "Americans" as Northern and Southern Europeans are Europeans. Calling themselves THE Americans and the rest latinos (what do they call Canadians? I guess just Canadians) lowers our history and culture. North-Americans or US-Americans or whatever-Americans shouldn't be the ones defining who is American, who is Latino-American, who is Native-American, Afro-American. Not surprising, there isn't a Euro-American tag.

>Calling themselves THE Americans and the rest latinos

"Latinos" are what Spanish and (to a much lesser extent) Portuguese-speaking people living in the USA call themselves (and their relatives still living in other Latin-American countries). They seem to prefer it to "Hispanics". And the term only applies to people speaking Latin-derived languages (i.e., Spanish and Portuguese). So the people living in Belize, for instance, are not "Latinos" at all.

Similarly, African-Americans were named that way by themselves, to distinguish themselves from the majority white Americans, since they had a very different and unique culture and history. It wasn't some kind of pejorative they were stuck with by outsiders; they came up with it on their own because they were tired of being called "negroes", "colored", or much worse.

You seem to have a very warped perception of who thinks what, and as the other poster said, you obviously have an ax to grind.

People in the USA are called "Americans" because it's (part of) the name of their country, and there's no other convenient and pronounceable demonym to describe them, and there's no other country in the world that has the word "America" in it.

> "Latinos" are what Spanish and (to a much lesser extent) Portuguese-speaking people living in the USA call themselves (and their relatives still living in other Latin-American countries). They seem to prefer it to "Hispanics".

In my part of the world (Santa Fe, New Mexico), people of "direct" Spanish descent prefer the term "Hispano" to differentiate themselves from both Hispanics (n-th cousins who might still arrive here, but did so after several generations south of Mexico City), and Latinos which is broadly equivalent to Hispanic.

According to surveys, most people in the US prefer to refer themselves as “Hispanic”, though there’s a generational change

https://www.pewresearch.org/race-and-ethnicity/2024/09/12/u-...

They generally prefer to be called what they are: Mexicans, Salvadorans, Cubans, etc. The ones born here in the US of A even often just prefer Americans sometimes, although that differs from person to person.

Pan-ethnic terms are the creatures of demographers, political scientists and others of the social sciences. We don’t really need that crap and it’s just there to make their jobs easier.

>People in the USA are called "Americans" because it's (part of) the name of their country, and there's no other convenient and pronounceable demonym to describe them

There is another demonym, although much less used:

USian.

It's quite convenient and pronounceable. Some HNers use it:

>https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

Also see the Wikipedia definition of the word you used - demonym:

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

The first two sentences at the above link:

>A demonym (/ˈdɛmənɪm/; from Ancient Greek δῆμος (dêmos) 'people, tribe' and ὄνυμα (ónuma) 'name') or gentilic (from Latin gentilis 'of a clan, or gens')[1] is a word that identifies a group of people (inhabitants, residents, natives) in relation to a particular place.[2] Demonyms are usually derived from the name of the place (hamlet, village, town, city, region, province, state, country, and continent).

I'm going with this one for now on. Thanks!

Thanks also to all USians that commented. As a fellow American, I think we should be more United! :)

All you guys put together, i.e. all countries in both the American continents (North and South), need an American national anthem (not a USian one), to put you on the right track to continental and then world solidarity.

Unfortunately, what's needed is that the USians stop putting themselves as the main character and everyone else supporting. What's more interesting about this American identity is that the US and all other American countries have an almost identical history, the US is only the most prosperous ex-colony. But almost all countries in America were built in a similar manner. It is a continental identity as much as being European, Asian or African.

The fact that my sibling comment (by me), about HNerds using racist and derogatory terms like Asian sweatshop, got flagged within seconds after I wote it, shows clearly that it is true, and that racist discrimination exists on HN, despite the vaunted claims by the mods of keeping it as a clean and nice community.

Hah!

Interestingly, there’s a word in Spanish for people from the USA that’s “Estadounidense”, literally “Unitedstatian” which is widely used (at least in Spain)

I find it a fascinating word and a way of precisely naming to keep the “American” word to be more broadly applicable, at least in theory

It is both less specific (there are many countries named “United States of …”) and unpronounceable in English.

IMO a better English translation of Estadounidense is United Stateser (like people in Maine are Mainers).

Do people of Estados Unidos Mexicanos count as estadounidense?

https://dle.rae.es/estadounidense

https://dem.colmex.mx/Ver/estadounidense

Americans don’t refer, in English, to the inhabitants of countries south of them as “latinos.” You are simply incorrect on this.

Among Spanish speakers the word is used, but it is a cultural not geographic term. There are ISA and Canadian Latinos too.

Mexico is part of North America, interesting you left it out.

as is Greenland

Along with the Caribbean, Bermuda, and Saint Pierre and Miquelon.

true but a lot of people understandably assume those are part of Central America

> I have some sympathy for Brazil getting pissed off about Amazon (the company) too.

I have never seen anybody pissed about that one. But then, I have never seen anybody insisting that "Amazon" means the company and the geographic region better shut-up and forfeit its name.

The source of this terminology difference is that continents have no universal definition, only societal convention. Romance language–speaking countries tend to teach the six‐continent model with a single America, whereas Anglophone countries like the UK, Australia, and USA teach the seven‐continent model with North and South America. Neither side is wrong, since there’s no universally agreed upon idea of what the continents are, only convention (and neither convention matches the current geological consensus either). The equivalent term to Spanish “America” in English is “the Americas,” not “America.” My Brazilian friends consider themselves “American,” but I’ve never met a Canadian who did.

The name of our country is the United States of America. Sometimes we call it the US, or United States, sometimes we call it America.

Much as yours is called la República Federativa do Brasil, which you call Brasil for short. Do you ever call it the RF I wonder? Real question, I have no idea.

Whatever you call America, the country, in your language, that's up to you. The Chinese call us 美國, the few of us aware of that are not even slightly bothered by it. Your language, your rules.

You have no right, and no ability, to dictate to Americans how we refer to ourselves and our nation, in our main (but not official) language. We do not care what your name for us is, and we do not care at all what you think about how we refer to ourselves.

For the record, in America we do not think of the Americas as one continent, but rather, two. So Brazilians, as we style you, are South American. Canadians, Mexicans, and Americans, are North Americans. If we need for some reason to refer to the people of both continents we might say "people of the Americas" but this doesn't come up much, just as we might say "Old Worlders" to refer to the megacontinent of Europe, Asia, and Africa.

The chip you carry around on your shoulder does you no credit at all. The notion that because we use a word in the name of our nation to refer to ourselves in some way denigrates the other inhabitants of the two continents, North and South America, which happen to share that word with the name of our nation...

That is 100% a you problem, not an us problem, and not a US problem. Get over it. Or don't.

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