What would be the most correct latinish way of forming an adjective for the word state? “Statan” “statian” “stative”?
The reason I ask is because I avoid using the term “American” when referring to people of the United States. I would like to use a legitimate adjective form based on “United States” instead, and reserve “American” properly as a continental adjective to refer to all people of the Americas, not specifically for those of the USA.
Therefore I am wondering which form may be most appropriate for this:
United Statan?
United Statian?
United Statal?
Me thinks I should know this. But I appreciate any help you may give.
Strictly speaking, there isn’t one, Essorant, but you use State itself in an attributive sense in English. So: State university, state-chambers, state occasion, state carriage and State citizen or United States citizen.
[I won’t try this in Latin because it’s all to do with English]
Well, sah, we heah in the suthahn Yewnahted States refah to ahsevs as us’n’s. Ah suppose you cood capitalahz that as US’n’s. Which wood make y’all in the rest a’ the world them’n’s.
But noone calls Mexico that except for official purposes. However, the United States are internationally known by that name, United States. That is not ambiguous while saying simply America is.
It’s like the United Kingdom. There are other united kingdoms in the world, but only the one of Great Britain and Northern Ireland is known by that name.
But that’s the thing, America is not ambiguous either. I don’t think I have ever heard any one use America or American and not mean the US, except in certain official names like the Organization of American States. In compound words/phrases, it doesn’t necessarily refer to the US (“North/South American”, “Native American”, “Mesoamerican” and countless others), but the plain terms do.
But anyway, as long as nobody calls me an American, I’ll be fine .
I was thinking about other words of similar form, and realized examples in English of words that end in -ate, (from -atus participles) have adjectives that usually take the ending -ive:
Native, creative, imperative, dative, etc.
Perhaps on this basis, United Stative would be best?
Interestingly, Spanish has a term “Estadounidense” which would be exactly what you were looking for if we were speaking Spanish. Like saying “United Statesian” It’s a shame English has no such form. Ironically, Spanish speakers in latin america hardly use it in speech prefering to refer to citizens of the US as “norteamericanos” which is hardly more accurate than “American” since North America includes Canada and Mexico.
But then again, language is not a branch of logic or mathematics, it’s about communication and in English the term “American” is unambiguous
Well, my problem isn’t that I think it is ambiguous, but because I know it is a misnomer. America and American are continental words, they belong to America/Americas as a whole, and all the people of the Americas, not just United States and the United Statives.
Also, if one persist with “America” meaning “United States of America”, then the name “United States of America” is the likeness of saying “United States of the United States of America”, a nonsensical result and not what the name originally and literally means.
The misnomer may be longlived and popular, but it is not going to be from any help from me.
well this discussion is going to lead to nowhere productive, but still, if noone uses America to refer to the continent, what do you call people coming from countries south to Panama? Because a South American would be a Texan, isn’t it?
I’m no native English speaker so that’s maybe why I can’t see how America is unambiguous, since in my language it refers only to the whole continent, but I accept it may be so in the conventions of your language.
The term “American” is unambiguous in English simply because every native English speaker knows that it refers to a citizen of the US, illogical and “imprecise” though it may be. It may be ambiguous in other languages which may have their own ways of describing US citizens that are more accurate which is my point above with regards to Spanish.
The English language just has to make do without words like United Statesian. The UK has the opposite problem. There is no adjectival form for everybody in the UK and the shorthand “Brit” leaves out the Northern Irish! United Kingdomian anyone?
Who says language is logical? More importantly, what does this have to do with Latin?
How about Kingdominion for us fawning minions! Pro omnibus nostrorum corculis vel deliciis qui illic habitamus, “Kingdominion” anglicè suggero.
In the future, all the Latin speakers will need to speak English if they want to translate documents from that language into Latin. Futurò, oportet omnes qui Latinè loquentur ut anglicam linguam habebunt ad vertendum scripta anglica in latinam.
I think this will sound better in peoples ears too, since it rhymes with another word used for people, that they are already very familiar with, that is, “natives”.
I think your new coinage will fly just about as well as the radical feminist initiative to introduce “ze” as a gender-neutral pronoun applicable to people. You know, “he”, “she” and “ze”. Yeah, I hear that all the time.
Like it or not, I think we’re pretty much stuck with “American” as a word referring to a citizen of the USA. To disambiguate, when necessary, one would have to use a cumbersome phrase like “from the American continent”. But don’t worry, people won’t think you’re a bad person just because you share the continent with US’n’s.
Only if the English language were “logical”, or more precisely, only if the meaning of every word/phrase was the mere composition of the meaning of the parts that made up that word/phrase. But that’s not the case (like the pointless debate about how antisemitism “shouldn’t” mean prejudice against Jews) – this seems to be common with with geographic/ethnic names, e.g. Palestinian only refers to some people of geographic Palestine, Macedonian (controversially) refers only to some people from geographic Macedonia (and like the case with America, virtually all non-Greek English speakers now use plain Macedonia to refer to only a small part of geographic Macedonia), the Pennsylvania Dutch aren’t Dutch (which only technically can now refer to Germans but doesn’t normally), I’m English Canadian but I don’t have a single drop of English blood in me (unless one of my great-great-great-great-grandmothers had a little fun with Lord Byron) so I’m not English, etc. So long story short, someone from South America is a South American, like I’m a North American, but neither of use would be an American, except in a technical sense, no matter how illogical that may seem – but that’s half of the fun of languages, isn’t it?
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