Prentiss Riddle: Language

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Americans and Americanos

If you use the word "American" in the USA sense around a person from Spanish-speaking Latin America, you're likely to get a lecture about the arrogance of our appropriating the term for a whole hemisphere to refer just to ourselves. In Spanish, América means what we call "the Americas" and we are los Estados Unidos.

If you ask what an alternative adjective is, though, all you're likely to be offered is "North American" (norteamericano), which someone from Canada will find arrogant for exactly the same reasons. In Spanish there is a further alternative unavailable to us in English, estadounidense, which works okay but not in the language accused of arrogance.

Some early 20th (late 19th?) century reformers attempted to coin a new term in English. Frank Lloyd Wright famously tried to popularize "Usonian" (proper noun "Usonia"). I've always wondered whether that is connected to Ludwig Zamehof's coinage of usona (n. Usono) in Esperanto. But nothing caught on.

Meanwhile in Brazil as far as I can tell the sensitivity to "American" in the gringolandian sense seems to be nonexistent: we who have to stand in the separate line to be fingerprinted at immigration are americanos, pure and simple. (I still haven't been able to figure out which meaning is associated with the ubiquitous Wal-Mart of Brazil, Lojas Americanas.)

Are there any other languages which comply with the usage preferred by Spanish? Or does "American" mean USA around the world?

(For extra credit, a puzzle which pops up every time I compare and contrast Brazil with its neighbors: Is there any shorter formula than "Spanish-speaking Latin America" to refer to, well, Spanish-speaking Latin America?)

language 2004.10.09 link