Wales' Greatest Achievement: The United States of America!

[giblets]

Wales is such a sh!thole that all of the good people left for America (names after an Italian, sorry). Same as Ireland.

[rah]

I'm not buying your 'PROOF'. I'll stick with the consensus.

From another WIKI entry

Richard ap Meryk, Anglicised to Richard Amerike (or Ameryk) (c. 1445–1503) was a wealthy Anglo-Welsh merchant, royal customs officer and sheriff of Bristol.[1] He was the principal owner of the Matthew, the ship sailed by John Cabot during his voyage of exploration to North America in 1497.[1] A Bristolian scholar and amateur historian, Alfred Hudd, suggested in 1908 that the continental name America was derived from Amerike's surname due to his sponsorship of Cabot's expedition to Newfoundland and was used on early British maps that have since been lost. However, the consensus view is that America is named after Amerigo Vespucci, the Italian explorer.

[I AM MOBIUS]

I'm not buying your 'PROOF'. I'll stick with the consensus.

From another WIKI entry

My proof: two links to original 16th C. documents published by none other than Vespucci himself...

Please tell me why America is not called 'Vespuccia' instead, or if we are to believe they went completely off-convention: 'Alberica', huh, huh?

And the consensus also was that the Earth was flat. I never took you for a flat-earther, rah...

[rah]

Well the consensus now is that the world is round.
I don't think those two documents actually prove anything. We're all entitled to our opinions.

I do remember an old fireside theater bit where they called it Vespuccialand.

[I AM MOBIUS]

Exactly. So one day the consensus might be that America was named after Richard ap Meryk.

Those documents prove that if people were to go against all naming conventions of the time, that Vespucci already had a latinised name: Albericus.

As you say yourself, if it were named after him as per convention, America should have been called 'Vespuccia' instead...

[rah]

I doubt it will ever be consensus. A lot of people have reviewed the "proof" you have presented and not deemed it as concrete proof. I'll go along with those for now. If more surfaces, I'll review it and take it into consideration like I do for most things.

[I AM MOBIUS]

Well, I haven't really presented any proof about Richard ap Meryk, just my assertion so far. But what little evidence there is, is compelling and plausible.

My proof so far, is more that if they wanted to name the new continent after Vespucci, they would have:

A) Named it based on his surname, as per the convention to name things after the surnames of explorers, or anyone who is not royalty, for that matter. He was never royalty, so it should have never been based on his first name.

B) If they were to defy all convention and name it based on his first name - he already had a latinised version of his name that he himself was using (Albericus), so they would have had to make his name up to get to 'Americus'...

Both explanations sound unlikely, do you not agree...?

[rah]

I never said it was without any merit. I just don't consider it enough to change my opinion. Like many other scholars. But as always with scholars you'll always find some that support different theories.

[giblets]

http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/951/why-was-america-named-after-amerigo-vespucci

Dear Cecil:

We all know that America was named for Amerigo Vespucci. What does Amerigo mean in Italian?

— Dave Curwin, Newton, Massachusetts

Cecil replies:

What do you mean, what does it mean in Italian? What does Dave mean in English? Amerigo by Vespucci's day was an established if not especially common name whose original meaning, it is safe to say, had long been forgotten. AV apparently got it for no more profound reason than that it was his grandfather's name.

Since you asked, there are a couple of theories on the name's origin. One is that it is a variant of Enrico, the Italian form of Henry, and derives from the Old German Haimirich (in later German Emmerich, in English Americus), from haimi, home, plus ric, power, ruler. Alternatively, it may come from the old German Amalricus, from amal, work, plus ric. (Amalricus the foreman? Beats me.) Amerigo shows up in Italian writing from around the 12th century and may have been introduced by the Ostrogoths six centuries earlier (this from Dictionary of First Names, Hanks and Hodges, 1990).

A more interesting question is why the cartographer Martin Waldseemueller in 1507 named the New World (actually, just South America) America rather than Vespucciland--although I guess to ask the question is to answer it. Amerigo's first name was a lot more euphonious than his last name, and (no small matter) could be latinized into a word that started and ended with the letter A, just like Asia and Africa before it. Also, unlike Christopher Columbus, invariably referred to by his last name, Vespucci was one of those people known in his own lifetime mostly by his first.

The most interesting question of all is why America was named after a guy who was otherwise so obscure. For centuries it was argued that Amerigo Vespucci was a fraud who had never traveled to the continent that bore his name and did not deserve to have either of his names applied to anything. But it is now fairly well established that he made at least two voyages to the Americas, not as leader of an expedition but possibly as navigator, the first time in 1499. He was not the first European of his era to set foot on the mainland, as was once thought, but probably was the first to realize that the land he helped explore was a separate continent and not merely the coast of Asia, as Columbus and others believed.

Vespucci came to the world's attention chiefly through the publication in 1503 and 1504 of two brief letters he purportedly wrote to Lorenzo de Medici about a voyage undertaken for the king of Portugal. Obviously the work of an educated man (the Vespuccis were a prosperous family in Florence), the letters managed to be both scholarly and entertaining, combining a sober discussion of navigational issues with the news that the natives of the New World would have sex with anybody, including Mom. Vespucci, or perhaps his anonymous publisher, also had the wit to entitle the first letter Novus Mundus, the New World, an audacious and as it turned out accurate claim.

The letters were by far the most interesting account of explorations in the Americas that had appeared up to that time and caused a sensation that if anything exceeded that created by Columbus's description of his first voyage ten years earlier. The letters were reprinted in every European language and soon came to the attention of Waldseemueller and his friends, who were members of a think tank of sorts in the town of Saint-Die, Lorraine, now part of France. The Waldseemueller group published Cosmographiae Introduction (Introduction to Cosmography), the first attempt to update the geography texts of the ancients. They were quite taken with Vespucci's idea that the Americas were a new land, since it meant they had gone beyond the knowledge of the ancients, in whose shadow they had long toiled. They thought it only appropriate that AV's name grace the new land, of whose extent they had at that point only the vaguest inkling. The naming of America after Amerigo Vespucci was thus a bit capricious but not entirely undeserved.

— Cecil Adams

You suck at history, although at least you don't claim to have a degree in it like Ben

[Thoth]

Wales is such a sh!thole that all of the good people left for America (names after an Italian, sorry). Same as Ireland.

And now America is a ****hole.

Coincidence?

I think not.

[rah]

Hmm, the lad may have a point.

[I AM MOBIUS]

http://www.straightdope.com/columns/...erigo-vespucci


You suck at history, although at least you don't claim to have a degree in it like Ben

And as per my links to the two said books above, he signs them with the latinisation of his name, 'Alberic(us)'.

Why did they not go with 'Alberica', if that is the case?

It just doesn't make any conventional sense.

Perhaps the reason why the maps said America, is because he had in his possession the maps of John Cabot who had already named the land after his patron...?

Broome contends that Cabot used the name America for his map, a copy of which Vespucci obtained.

This was purely speculative, he says, until 1955 when a misplaced letter was found in the Spanish National Archives. The letter confirms that Bristol merchants had reached Newfoundland earlier, and also notes that John Cabot’s map was sent to Columbus.

Also, I never claimed to be any good at history, but my reading comprehension works just fine.

[pchang]

Oh well. Quick relapse into delusions.. Poor Moby.

[Egbert]

Almost 50% of the Signatories of American Independence and the constitution were Welsh.
Discuss.

This is proof that the Welsh are a revolting and disloyal lot. Revolting against King George like that, they should be ashamed of their disloyalty.

[Dry]

The following page http://www.uhmc.sunysb.edu/surgery/america.html discuss different theories. Quite enlightening.

Icelandic origin

The Icelandic Saga of Eric the Red, the settler of Greenland, which tells how Eric's son Leif came to Vinland, was first written down in the second half of the 13th century, 250 years after Leif found a western land full of "wheatfields and vines"; from this history emerged a fanciful theory in 1930 that the origin of "America" is Scandinavian: Amt meaning "district" plus Eric, to form Amteric, or the Land of (Leif) Eric.

Norsemen origin

Other Norsemen went out to the land Leif had discovered; in fact, contemporary advocates of the Norse connection claim that from around the beginning of the 11th century, North Atlantic sailors called this place Ommerike (oh-MEH-ric-eh), an Old Norse word meaning "farthest outland." (This theory is currently being promoted by white supremacists of the so-called Christian Party

Mayan origin

"The name AMERICA or AMERRIQUE in the Mayan language means, a country of perpetually strong wind, or the Land of the Wind, and sometimes the suffix '-ique' and '-ika' can mean not only wind or air but also a spirit that breathes, life itself."

Vespucci origin

Even though the Latinization of Americus fits a pattern, why did the cosmographers not employ Albericus (hence the assumption that "Alberigo" was Vespucci's authentic Christian name), the Latinization that had already been used for Amerigo's name as the author of the Mundus Novus? Their substitution of Americus for the well-known Latinization Albericus might mean that they wanted a Latinization that would fit and explain the name America which they had already heard applied to the New World. Why did they ignore the common law in the naming of new lands: the use of the last names of explorers and the first names of royalty? Their ignoring it, Rea claims, further supports the idea that they were trying to force an explanation and that the only one they could think of was a Latinization of Vespucci's first name.

Caribbean origin

The coast at the foot of the Amerrique Mountains that faces the Caribbean Sea is called the Mosquito Coast, named for the Mosquito Indians, who live there still. The Mosquitos are Caribs. It is almost certain that Columbus first heard the name of the mountains pronounced by a Carib. Amerrique, therefore, must derive from a Carib word, possibly one of the Carib culture words — not a word in the Mayan language, which was not spoken in Nicaragua, though it almost resembles in sound the Quiche Mayan iq' amaq'el meaning perpetual wind. Further dispelling the idea of a Maya connection to America, Robert M. Laughlin, curator of Mesoamerican Ethnology at the Smithsonian Institution, and an eminent anthropologist with expertise in Mayan culture, points out that "r" is rarely in the alphabets of Mayan languages.

Welsh origin

The theory was developed by Alfred E. Hudd, a member of the Clifton Antiquarian Club, which in 1910 published his work in its proceedings; the paper, "Richard Ameryk and the Name America," had been read to the group two years before.

I would would go with the Caribbean origin wich sounds the most plausible to me.
From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Amerike

However, Jules Marcou, a prominent French geologist who while studying North America argued, as did other 19th-century writers, that Vespucci changed his Christian name from Alberico to Amerigo after his discovery. Indeed, the only records of Vespucci's full name were created a few years before his death,[citation needed] long after his voyage. Specifically, Marcou introduced the name of an Indian tribe and of a district in Nicaragua called Amerrique (Land of the Wind), visited by both Columbus and Vespucci. The region was rich in gold, which led to Amerrique and gold becoming synonymous with the explorers. Vespucci may have been bequeathed with the nickname by others, or invented it himself; either way, he signed two documents using "Amerigo". In 1507, Vespucci's published letters came into the hands of German scholars at St. Dié, near Strasbourg, France. Among them was Waldseemüller.