"Indian" State Names

[momta]

This is my latest video. Fourth on the channel. Hope you like it.

[Uncle Joe]

1. Kicked and recommended.

Thanks for the thread momta.

[momta]

3. Thanks, Uncle Joe.

[ShazzieB]

2. Wow, that was fascinating!

Thanks for sharing this.

[momta]

4. Thanks for the kind words, ShazzieB.

[Warpy]

5. Quibble: At the time, "Indian" was unrelated to today's India

because back then it was called Hindustan and the people Hindustani, no matter their religion or culture. Indian was a corruption of the Spanish term for "children of god," which often referred to unlearned and unconverted savages in their natural state.

A good discussion of this is at https://iloveancestry.com/topics/ancestry/historical-events/15th-18thcentury/origin-of-word-indian-pertaining-to-american-indians/

Tribal people around here call themselves and other tribal people Indians, a generic catchall that means native to the western hemisphere, or at least here first.

[momta]

6. Thanks for the link.

I'll do some reading. I had heard that before, but only in passing, and have never seen a detailed explanation. Just out of curiosity, where is "around here"?

[Warpy]

12. New Mexico

There are a lot of tribes out here, still more or less on their own land, although the US government, in its infinite wisdom, lumped several Apache tribes who didn't much like each other together on the Mescalero Reservation.

Back in New England, the local tribe were the Wampanoags. They called themselves Indians as a blanket term, also.

[wnylib]

8. True that at the time of Columbus

the word India did not refer to the Asian nation as we know it today.

But he used the Classical Latin term that Europeans used for southern Asia and uncertain lands farther east, "India." True that the Latin word derives from Greek "Indos." The Greeks referred to the people of southern Asia as Indoi, meaning "people of the Indus." The Indus River Valley was an advanced ancient civilization. The Greek word came from Old Persian, "Hindush" which is a cognate in Old Persian for the Sanskrit word, "Sindhu," meaning river, specifically Indus River

All of those languages are part of the same linguistic family, Indo-European, so the changes in pronunciation are the normal changes that occur between languages in the same language family.

As words shift in pronunciation, they also shift in usage and meaning. In the time of Columbus, Latin was still used in Europe for communication across boundaries
and Classical Latin place names were in common.usage. India at that time was a generic term for southern Asia.

Columbus did believe that he had reached islands in Asia, south of China. So it was natural that he would use the Latin term "India" to describe what he thought he had found. In Spanish, the people would be called los indios.

It is only coincidence that if you split indios into its two syllables, "in-dios" that it looks like "in God." But there is nothing to support that as the source and meaning of "indios." The "os" ending is the Spanish grammatical ending for the people of a place (mexicanos, americanos, colombianos, etc.). The first part of the word, "Indi" is the Latin root for India.

Columbus described the native people of Hispaniola as innocents, like children, because they were generous and outgoing compared to European society. Therefore, he reasoned, they could be easily conquered and enslaved. When Europeans realized that there were previously unknown people in previously unknown lands, not mentioned in the Bible, there were lengthy debates in Europe about whether they were human beings with souls.

[momta]

9. Thanks for this, wnylib.

This sounds a lot like the one piece I read claiming the connection between "indios" ("in God&quot and "India" but your detailed explanation makes it much more clear.

I have also read about those debates you mentioned in Europe with regard to the souls of the people indigenous to the "New World."

[wnylib]

13. It just doesn't work linguistically

to say that the source of the word "Indian" comes from a Spanish word meaning "in God." Not when the word "India" (in its European form) can be traced linguistically as a cognate for words in Greek, Old Persian, and Sanskit, all in the same language family and all of them referring to the Indus Valley civilization and its people. Being geographically farther away, Europeans came to use it for southern Asians in general.

Sometimes it is possible to split words up to trace a meaning IF they are compound words or made from compounded or blended morphemes or phonemes (basic sounds of a language). But it doesn't always work that way. Example: You could split up the English word "address" into "ad" and "dress" and say that the word "address" means an ad(vertisement) for a dress. That would be just as mistaken as saying that the Spanish word "indios" means "in dios" (in god).

[Warpy]

11. They didn't know about Indo-European language families

and only the most highly educated knew anything about the Indus River and its classical civilization. Columbus was not highly educated, at best he was the middling sort.

The article addresses all this, along with giving the Spanish origin of the word "indian."

[wnylib]

15. Columbus did not need to know

about language families. Whether or not HE knew about them is totally irrelevant to the meaning that he knew for the word "India," aka Indies (east Asian lands) in his time. Modern Americans use the word "caucus" without knowing that it is an Algonquian word with generally the same political meaning in its original language as it has come to have in English. A lot of non Native people in America don't know who the word Algonquin refers to. Doesn't stop them from using the word caucus with the same general meaning as the original Algonquian word.

A high level of education was not necessary for people in Columbus' time to know that there was a place called India, or the Indies. India had been trading with ancient Middle East civilizations for many centuries (a few millennia, actually) before Columbus, and indirectly, via the Middle East, with southern Europe. From southern Europe, sailors took trade items to northern Europe, where royals, nobles, and wealthy aristocrats bought them. As a result of the Crusades, the European desire for Asian goods increased hugely. Even totally uneducated common people would have heard of terms like "spices from India" or from the Indies by working as laborers on loading docks, as cooks in the kitchens of mansions, and as general household servants. They might never have seen a map or had any idea where India was, other than some distant strange land, but they had heard of it.

Italian port cities were the European center of trade in goods from the Middle East, India, and China. As a sailor from Genoa, Columbus would certainly have known about the Indies and spices. That was his motivation to seek a way to sail a different route to Asia.

Columbus had a good enough basic education to become a well read and self educated person on astronomy, geography, and history. He researched his idea of sailing west through books and tales from other sailors. Being widely read in his time also meant having some basic understanding of Latin, since many works were published in Latin. But that wasn't even necessary for him to know the word India as a term for eastern land in Asia, since it was a general term then, especially among people like Italians and Spaniards, whose native languages derive from Latin.

[Rhiannon12866]

7. K&R! Fascinating video!

We have many "Indian" names here in Northeastern New York as well, but I had no idea there were so many throughout the country.

[momta]

10. Thanks!

Very kind words.

[NurseJackie]

14. Is that your narration? Very nice.

It's a clear and soothing voice that I could listen to often. Nice pace, good pronunciation and enunciation. (Have you done this before?)

[momta]

16. Wow. Thank you!

Yes that's my voice. And no, I have never done narration before. One of my reservations about doing videos was having to listen to the sound of my own voice on them. I'm pretty self-conscious about it.

So, thanks for the kind words.

[left-of-center2012]

17. Thanks for sharing

Passed it along