LINGUISTIquips

Here’s an interesting topic in Historical Linguistics: from whence comes the word America? In modern American English, the term is essentially a synonym with United States, even though America can also denote the whole of North America or South America. When used without a modifier, however, America does not seem very ambiguous, as almost every reader certainly understood that I was referring to the English spoken in the United States when I wrote American English in the previous sentence, and not the English spoken in Brazil, for example.

A look at the Oxford English Dictionary’s etymology of America attributes it to a work written in 1507 by M. Waldseemüller entitled Cosmographiae Introductio, in which the term Americus was used as the Latinized form of the name Amerigo Vespucci. Vespucci was an Italian who sailed off the South American coast around 1500, and apparently the word America is derived from a translation of his first name. The word’s use in its current form is recorded in OED in a work by J. Shirley, written in 1659.

While the allusion to Amerigo Vespucci is the most commonly accepted etymology of America, there do exist some thought-provoking alternatives. For example, a work by Jules Marcou, in 1886, reported that Vespucci had actually changed his name to Amerigo from Alberigo (which would have been Latinized Albericus). According to Marcou, it was Vespucci’s dealings with natives around the Ameriqque mountains of South America that prompted him to change his name. This wouldn’t technically change the etymology of the term, of course, as Vespucci was reported as Americus in 1507, but it is interesting nonetheless to consider that the word itself is derived from a native term and not a Latinized name.

Still another theory exists: in 1497, Briton John Cabot embarked for the New World, and is commonly considered to be the first western European to set foot on North America. The financier of his expedition was a fellow Englishman, one mister Richard Amerike. The jump from Amerike to America (if it actually occurred) is a small and believable one, and so America could be named after an expedition financier of years long passed.

There are doubtlessly other examples of theoretical etymologies of America floating around out there; if any readers know of some I haven’t mentioned, please, comment.