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What indigenous word would be appropriate to rename United States? (lemmy.ca)
submitted 2 months ago by to c/asklemmy@lemmy.world
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The world is considering renaming United States on their maps. As the indigenous people discovered and explored the land thousands of years before the first Europeans, it's fitting that they should do it. Many nations made up the area. Is there any name that would be representitive of all?

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[–] 4 points 2 months ago (1 child)

There were also a lot of different languages. It would be like asking for a European named for Europe.

To offer something of a counterpoint: is there any European language that doesn't call Europe some variation of "Europa"? Europe has dozens of languages that developed in relative isolation, but a fairly consistent name for the continent was pushed into all of them.

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  • [–] 7 points 2 months ago

    More info: The term did not originally refer to a unified continent but was gradually expanded by Greek geographers and historians like Herodotus to distinguish the western lands from Asia and Libya (Africa). It was not until the Middle Ages and the Carolingian Renaissance that "Europe" solidified as a distinct cultural and political identity linked to Christianity and the former Western Roman Empire, evolving from a vague regional descriptor into the modern continental concept.

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