Comment by spauldo
4 days ago
In English, there is no continent named "America." It's unambiguously used to refer to the United States.
4 days ago
In English, there is no continent named "America." It's unambiguously used to refer to the United States.
How is the continent called then?
Continents are a social construct. In North American English, we typically divide the Americas into a North and South America. The collective noun for North and South America is the Americas. (Though this remains ambiguous in respect of the Caribbean and Pacific Islands.)
Getting pedantic about calling America America is sort of like insisting on referring to China as Zhonghua. Like, sure. Whatever. But you’re clearly insisting on substituting a substantial discussion with a semantic one.
I thought continents are a geographical term divided by tectonic plates and such. Still seams to be weird to single out a single country to assign the name of a continent.
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I'm speaking as someone who has done a bit of research into this topic.
I'm not aware of a single example of an English-speaking country that teaches that there's a continent named "America." It's taught as two continents: North America and South America. "America" is just short for the "United States of America," and in English it's entirely unambiguous.
Even the phrase Americentrism undermines your point. This is like reading about a Dacian complaining about the Romans using the term Mare Nostrum. Nobody really pays any mind to the client states of an empire.
I would not say "unambiguously" when it comes to natural languages.
And no, "America" may have referred to the US when I was a kid and here in Central Europe we had Back to the Future type of shoes with the American flag, yeah, and I would not say unambiguously so.
If someone says "America" to refer to a place, they really ought to specify if they want you to understand them.
I can't think of any English speaking countries in central Europe off the top of my head.
"America" is short for "The United States of America" in English. That's its definition. I don't understand how people have difficulty with this concept.
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But America isn't a place. There's the Americas, as in plural, referring to the continents of North America and South America.
So America is unassigned, hence why we assigned it to the USA colloquially.
Just for the sake of it I checked Wikipedia.
> The Americas, sometimes collectively called America, are a landmass comprising the totality of North America and South America. When viewed as a single continent, the Americas are the 2nd largest continent by area after Asia, and is the 3rd largest continent by population. The Americas make up most of the land in Earth's Western Hemisphere and constitute the New World.
Yeah, OK, not sure "America" refers to The Oh-So-Great United of America according to this. Guess what? You can find 10 in each direction. Specify. If you disagree with "one should specify", why down-vote? Baffling, baffling indeed.
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I keep getting down-voted, but I have never been against being specific, in fact, I was advocating to be specific[1], i.e. North American, Latin American, South America, etc.
[1] "If someone says "America" to refer to a place, they really ought to specify if they want you to understand them.".
Additionally, natural languages are inherently ambiguous.
So ugh, I do not think we disagree.
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