Editor’s note: Welcome to InDepthNH.org’s new column Speaking of Words. Michael Ferber retired from the English Department at UNH, but has plenty more to say and write about words. We are thrilled he wants to do that for our readers. Welcome Michael! – Nancy West
Speaking of Words
By MICHAEL FERBER
At a meeting at UNH a few years ago I was taken to task by a graduate student for using the phrase “American Indians.” She said the term was incorrect and derogatory, and these people should be called “Native Americans.” For the rest of our discussion I switched to her preferred term, but in the New York Times later that day I found an ad for the American Indian Dance Theatre. It is a company whose members belong to different tribes, and they must have decided that the pan-tribal term “American Indian” is not derogatory at all. Surely they are right.
“Indian,” of course, rests on a mistake. Columbus believed he had reached the Indies on the far side of the Pacific, various sets of islands south of the Asian continent. He thought he was near Japan, and never realized he was near a “new” continent instead. The name “Indies” is also odd, along with “Indonesia,” which means “Indian Islands” in Greek, though it was coined by Europeans in the 19th century. These names are projections of “India” from a western viewpoint: everything in the oceans east of India we westerners call “Indies.” “India” itself is a projection by the Greeks: everything beyond the Indos River becomes “India.” “Indos” (now used in the Latin spelling “Indus”) is the Greek version of “Hindus,” which is the Persian version of “Sindhu,” which in Sanskrit just means “river.” To compound all these absurdities, the Indus River is not in today’s India, but in Pakistan.
Despite all that, “Indians” is not a term of abuse for Native Americans, though some Native Americans may think so. Nor is “Native American” itself free of dubious assumptions. Strictly speaking, humans are not native to any continent but Africa, though it is certainly true that Indians came to the Americas many thousands of years before Europeans “discovered” them. More interesting is “America,” short for “America Terra,” the name a German mapmaker gave to the continent after Amerigo Vespucci recognized (unlike Columbus) that there was a big continent, or maybe two, between Europe and Asia. “America” now is short for “United States of America,” and that leads to the nonsensical claim that America is part of North America. “Native Americans,” then, refers to the Indians who live in the United States. That term might refer just as well to the Indians who live anywhere in the two Americas, but it doesn’t. In Canada the official term is “First Nations,” and I think we “Americans” should adopt it.
We can avoid this mess, of course, when we can refer to an individual tribe. But there are pitfalls there, too, because the names English-speakers have adopted for some tribes are terms of abuse borrowed from their neighboring tribes. The people we call Iroquois call themselves the “Haudenosaunee,” which means, if my source is right, “they are building a long house” (alluding to the confederacy of five or six tribes). We got “Iroquois” from a tribe that fought them, the Huron (or rather Wendat, since “Huron” may be another term of abuse); “Iroquois” comes from irinakhoiw, which means “black snakes” or something similar in Wendat.
Simple courtesy demands that we call people what they want to be called, but sometimes the habit of centuries intervenes. Periodically the Greek government protests against our terms “Greek” and “Greece.” It wants us to say “Hellene” for the people and “Hellas” or “The Hellenic Republic” for the country. The Greeks have never called themselves “Greeks.” That term comes from Latin “Graeci,” which comes from “Graikoi,” the name of one group of Greeks in southern Italy, presumably the first Greeks the Romans encountered. In another projection or generalization, everyone else who resembled these people or spoke their language were “Greeks.” “Greek” and “Greece” are here to stay, however, along with similar terms in most European languages; they are not derogatory terms.
We might add that the people of Germany don’t seem to mind that we call their country “Germany,” though they call it “Deutschland.” The English names for China and Japan are quite different from the words in Mandarin and Japanese, but we don’t hear many complaints about them.
A more successful example of name-changing is “Asian” versus “Oriental.” Most English-speaking Asians, as well as Asian-Americans, prefer “Asian” as the most general term for people who live in or come from that huge continent. But if “Oriental” had not acquired disparaging secondary nuances it would be the more appropriate term. It simply means “Eastern” in Latin, and corresponds to “Occidental” or “Western.” It’s true that “Eastern” means east of Europe, and that might seem parochial, since Asia is west of, say, California if you look out over the Pacific. (Most of Asia is west of Japan, too, though the Japanese word for Japan is “Nihon,” which comes from the Chinese word for sunrise or east!) But “Oriental” is not in itself derogatory.
“Asia,” now the approved term, is about as parochial as you can get. The name was originally what the Greeks called a tiny part of what is now Turkey, and seems to have been taken from what the locals there called themselves 3000 years ago. It then got projected onto the whole of “Asia Minor” and then onto everything east of it as far as China, and Japan. But if Asians want to be called “Asians,” they have a perfect right to be called that, though I think they should tip their hats to the little forgotten country that shows up in ancient Greek and Hittite texts.
The Roman word “Africa” used to mean the area around Carthage, modern Tunis, which the Romans knew all too well. It did not include Egypt, Libya, or Ethiopia. Now it does, and much else besides.
There is no consensus about the origin of the name “Europe.” I think it had nothing to do with the girl named Europa, who was famously abducted from Phoenicia by Zeus in the form of a bull and taken to Crete. Among other locales in the ancient Greek world, “Europe” sometimes referred to Thrace, which is just across the Dardanelles (or Hellespont) and the Bosporus from Asia Minor. These channels since ancient times have marked the border between Asia and Europe. A Greek-speaker in, say, Troy, might well have called the land across the narrow channel “Europe,” and, as with “Asia” and “Africa,” casually generalized the term. It is as if Manhattanites considered everywhere west of the Hudson River to be New Jersey, which I guess some of them do. Now that’s a term of abuse.
I am happy to hear from readers with questions or comments: mferber@unh.edu.