| Thomas Bushnell BSG 2004-09-05, 2:47 am |
| "John H. Robinson, IV" <jaqque@debian.org> writes:
> I still stand by ``If you are from the Americas, you are American.''
> Period.
This is a wonderful theory, but it just doesn't fit the facts. Maybe
you want language to be consistent, but wishing doesn't make it so.
"If you are from Hispania, you are Spanish." Nope, wrong!
Language doesn't work that nicely in practice. As it happens, in
Esperanto there is an unambiguous term: "Usono" is the USA, and
"usonano" is an American. But English has ambiguous words here.
"American" can mean a national of the US; it can also mean someone
from the Americas. The latter usage is much less common: I have
*never* heard a Canadian call themselves American. It has perhaps
happened, but it is extremely rare.
> To claim that you are American is to make only one claim:
> you are from the Americas.
Only if you think that the adjective names must rigidly map to the
place names from which they are derived, and, whether one likes it or
not, they don't. That's just how language works: messy and
inconsistent.
Thomas
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