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Definition paper american (Click to select text)
When you hear the word "American," where do think a person described with this word is from? Of course, you will say from America. But what is America for you? Maybe the United States, and so an American is a citizen of this country. Have you thought that an American can also be from any other country located in the western hemisphere, like Argentina, Panama or perhaps Canada? The word "American" came from the word "America," which is a continent first known as the new "fourth part" of the world. It was discovered on October 12, 1492, when Christopher Columbus saw an island in the Bahamas which the Indians called Guanahani and Columbus rechristened San Salvador. Following this, Columbus made three other voyages to America in 1493, 1498, and 1502. During those trips, he touched the coasts of South and Central America. In that time, the continent was known by the earliest explorers and historians as the Indies, the West Indies, or the New World. In 1499, Alonso de Ojeda and Juan de la Cosa visited South America, and with them went Amerigo Vespucci who wrote such popular accounts of his own deeds that the German geographer Martin Waldseemuller coined the word "America" in Cosmographiae Introductio, a small work designed to accompany and explain a wall map and globe executed by Waldseemuller. In this work two names were suggested for the "fourth part" of the world, one Amerige (pronounced A-mer-i-gay with the -ge from the Greek, meaning "earth"), and the other America (in the feminine form, parallel to Europa and Asia). The latter form was placed on Waldseemuller's maps of 1507, and their wide circulation brought about the gradual adoption of the name. Waldseemuller was aware of only South America as a continent, but Gerhardies Mercator thirty years later extended the designation to both continents. Paradoxically, the word "American" that was first used to designate people from South America is now used to refer only to U.S. citizens. Even though it is right to say that a citizen of the United States is an American, it is also right to say that a citizen of Central or South America is an American too, since the definition of America is "of or pertaining to North or South America: the American continents."
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