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Comment by lotyrin | Hacker News Reader

Are you really proposing that Native Americans are not Americans? Is the term "American" so stained by colonialist hate?

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Idk, seems like if you're already established somewhere and someone else comes in and tells you the place you live and your ancestors have lived in for millennia is now called "America"... Dunno, that feels kind of wrong.

First, it's not "America", it's "The Americas" -- we're talking about the two continents, right? The New World?

Second, that's the word we use in English. If you've lived here for millenia, you can use the appropriate word in your own language.

Whether you count it as two continents or one depends on where you are from.

Who counts them as one continent? That seems hard to argue geographically. I don't think a land bridge prevents them from being continents.

> The six-continent combined-America model is taught in Greece and many Romance-speaking countries—including Latin America.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continent?wprov=sfti1#Number

All English-speaking countries count them as two continents though.

And in English, it's conventionally "the Americas" even if you believe it's a single continent.

Kind of like, we call it the Bahamas, not Bahama, even though it's one country. It's linguistic, not conceptual.

Very interesting. I can't check the Greek-language citations; I'd love to hear from someone who has lived or gone to school in one of those countries.

You have to call it something. Place names are a function of language, not of genetics. In English it's called North America or South America, and together The Americas. In Chinese South America is "South Beautiful Continent".

Oh nooo, I'm so offended that Chinese people have a name that I didn't agree too for the place my ancestors are from for the last 350 years. Someone give me some pearls to clutch.

But that’s what it’s called in English, the language the article is written in.

Germans don’t call the place they live Germany. They don’t even call themselves Germans. But I call it Germany because that’s the English name for that place.

Maybe their point is that they were native Asians and not native Americans.

Their "point" was nothing more than repeating the colonialist propaganda that the real americans were the ones who ""settled"" later and named the continent.

(ALso that is a so ridiculous reasoning, by that logic everyone is native african and not native <insert place where they genetically diverged and settled>)

> by that logic everyone is native african

No that does not follow, but the very first individuals who migrated to America (the humans this discussion is about) obviously were not born in America. By my logic there were no native Americans that came from Asia to America, but their descendants became native.

Yes I know, very pedantic. I don't think there is anything wrong with the title.

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