Not in English. I know in the Spanish speaking world there's a single American continent, but as far as I know across the English speaking world it's taught as two continents, North and South America. We have the term "the Americas" to refer to both.
I really think this is a failure of education, teaching kids that there are N continents as if that were some kind of objective truth, as opposed to the reality that the definition of “continent” is at least partially conventional, so there are several different values of N which are arguably correct - anything from 4 to 7 is mainstream (at a global level)
Wikipedia is helping, though.
It says (I didn’t know this) that the “single American continent” model was mainstream in the US prior to WW2, so even if there is now a single definition in the Anglosphere, that’s a relatively recent development.
I remember as a kid believing that the Americas contained three continents-North, Central and South. I’m sure I’m not the only person to have ever thought that, and given how conventional these definitions are, can it really be said to be wrong?
Well, in Ecuador and Peru, where I used to travel for 2 months, a lot of people were making a point of saying "América del Sur" to differentiate their place from the USA.
How would you argue such claims, geographically and/or accurately speaking? — Other than: that’s how I was taught it is; or that’s how my favourite teacher/book/source-with-some-authority says it is.
There is no generally-agreed-upondefinition for “continent”, in the same way that there was no generally-agreed-upon definition of “planet” prior to the IAU 2006 General Assembly.
Continents are identified by convention (and there are a few competing conventions) rather than any strict criteria.
I was taught (in Europe) that there are 6 continents, 1 of which close-to-uninhabited: Europe, Asia, Africa, Oceania, America, Antarctica. This convention is the same as the one for the UNSD “continental regions”. The five interlocking rings of the Olympic flag represent these five inhabited continents.
There’s another convention that considers Eurasia to be a single continent. And another that even considers Afro-Eurasia to be a single continent.
As an Australian, inculcated with the orthodoxy that this was the largest island while also being the smallest continent - how does 'Oceania' fit with your quite technical 'big contiguous mass of land'?
If we made another small rut parallel to either Suez or Panama, would we add 1 to the count of continents?
You could educate yourself, you know, instead of trying to regurgitate something that someone else said that you thought looked clever.
What would you call Americans? United Statesians?
There are two countries called the United States in North America, there's the United States of Mexico, and the United States of America. People from the United States of Mexico are called Mexicans, and people from the United States of America are called Americans.
And what about people from the continent of North America? There's called North Americans, just like people from South America are called South Americans.
> There are two countries called the United States in North America
No, actually, there aren't.
> there's the United States of Mexico, and the United States of America.
No, México’s formal English name (which is an exact literal translation of its Spanish name) is United Mexican States (it is Estados Unidos Mexicanos not Estados Unidos de México)
> I think this would translate to Mexican United States
If Estados Unidos existed in Spanish as a compound, non-proper, noun phrase—that is, if "a united states" was a generic name for a thing—rather than Unidos and Mexicanos both being adjectives that modify Estados, then that would be a plausible translation. But that's (1) not the case, and (2) even if it was the case, that's not how it is used in the actual official name of the country of México.
> you're mixing up the word order.
To be clear, you are asserting that the government of México messed up the word order in its own official English name.
Sorry, I did not realize this was the official translation.
I was just commenting on the fact that adjective order in Spanish is usually reversed vs. the English one, and the adjective closest to the noun remains closest to the noun.
Wikipedia mentions that an alternate official name is Estados-Unidos Mexicanos:
> All three federal constitutions (1824, 1857, and 1917, the current constitution) used the name Estados Unidos Mexicanos[29]—or the variant Estados-Unidos Mexicanos,[30] all of which have been translated as "United Mexican States"
Interesting that it's still translated this way. I'm wondering if there are some political considerations there (eg to avoid being called the "Mexican US"). Thanks for your response. I learned something today.
The terms “yank” and “seppo” were more common in older generations of Australians. If you could go back to the 1940s, I think you’d hear both terms a lot (in certain informal contexts)
One still occasionally hears “yanks”, but it is quite rare. “Seppos”, one more often hears joking about calling Americans that than anyone actually doing so-and the rare occasions the term is used (as opposed to merely mentioned), are (in my personal experience) self-conscious exercises in derogatory jocularity-related jocular coinages are “Sepponians” and “Seppostanis”
Of course, it is a big country, and terms which have fallen out of general use may be retained or revived in some pockets-I can only describe my own personal experiences
