America and Americans

[Mark A Mandel]

On Thu, 21 Feb 2002, Michael Vezie wrote:

#Frankly, it seems silly to me.  For a Canadian to claim to be from America
#is just plain wrong.  There is no continent called "America".  It's "North
#America" (or "South America", or collectively, "the Americas").  So the
#only geographical region that can be called "America" is the United States
#of America.

That's true in English, and I agree that "American" should not equal
'inhabitant of the Americas'. We speak of Europeans, Africans, Asians;
the noun "Eurasian" does not mean 'inhabitant of Eurasia' so much as
'person of mixed European-Asian ancestry', at least in non-technical
usage. (ADH4 advises circumlocution.)

But it is not so in all languages and cultures. I recall hearing of the
child of Americans living in Germany, fluent in German and attending a
German school, whose paper was marked wrong for counting the continents
as seven. There are five, said the teacher: Europe, Asia, Africa,
American, and Australia.

This view in other languages, to my mind, doesn't excuse the attempt to
force it onto English, but it does partially explain it.

-- Mark A. Mandel, Ph.D., d/b/a Dr. Whom
   editing, proofreading, and linguistic consultation