More "Native" Names

Challenge:
How could some placenames be more 'native' to their land for example, like Canada (which comes from the Iroquois word 'kanata' meaning settlement or village), or Mexico (which is derived from the name of the Mexica people and their god Huitzilopochtli who possessed Mexitl or Mexi as a secret name), or even some American/Canadian States/Provinces/Territories like Alabama, Mississippi, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Tennessee, North and South Dakota, Alaska, Hawaii Saskatchewan, Nunavut, Manitoba, Yukon, Ontario, Quebec, and others.

instead of names like

America (named after Amerigo Vespucci), Australia (mythical land of Terra Australis), New Zealand (after the Dutch province of Zeeland), South Africa (a kinda boring European name), Brazil (the mythical island of Brasil/ named after Brazilwood), Indonesia (which means India island in Greek), Indochina (India-China) which all sound very European and colonial.

The challenge is to have as many countries or places (cities, states, provinces etc) having native names for example, Aotearoa (Maori for 'land of the long white cloud') for New Zealand.

Good luck
 

jahenders

Banned
As far as the Americas, it's hard because there would have been many different names and it would be a matter of timing and relative strength as to which on dominated. Presumably, the Spanish could have brought back some "Native" name, Taino perhaps, for the lands they encountered and then used that on their maps. If so, that MIGHT have stuck IFF it was easily spelled/pronounced.

However, the British and others would have certainly gotten very different native names from the peoples they landed near and, had they been inclined, might have used those instead of the Spanish native name.

So, if the Spanish chose Taino, that might have stuck for the continental name and we'd have North and South Taino and, perhaps, the United States of Taino. However, whatever the word chosen, it wouldn't be much more representative of most natives than America is, since a word like Taino would only represent one small tribe on one small island. I guess they could have picked Aztec or something like that, which would represent more people/area, but it would be totally foreign to other native peoples.

On a smaller scale, you could certainly have more colonies/settlers use pre-existing place names instead of things like New Amsterdam, Boston, Plymouth, etc.

Challenge:
How could some placenames be more 'native' to their land for example, like Canada (which comes from the Iroquois word 'kanata' meaning settlement or village), or Mexico (which is derived from the name of the Mexica people and their god Huitzilopochtli who possessed Mexitl or Mexi as a secret name), or even some American/Canadian States/Provinces/Territories like Alabama, Mississippi, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Tennessee, North and South Dakota, Alaska, Hawaii Saskatchewan, Nunavut, Manitoba, Yukon, Ontario, Quebec, and others.

instead of names like

America (named after Amerigo Vespucci), Australia (mythical land of Terra Australis), New Zealand (after the Dutch province of Zeeland), South Africa (a kinda boring European name), Brazil (the mythical island of Brasil/ named after Brazilwood), Indonesia (which means India island in Greek), Indochina (India-China) which all sound very European and colonial.

The challenge is to have as many countries or places (cities, states, provinces etc) having native names for example, Aotearoa (Maori for 'land of the long white cloud') for New Zealand.

Good luck
 

Driftless

Donor
My home state: Wisconsin = Meskonsing (maybe....)

"Wisconsin" is the anglicized version of the French rendering of "Meskousing" which later became "Ouisconsin", which in turn likely originates from the Algonquian word "Meskonsing". That term may connect to either the reddish rocks of the dells of the (now) Wisconsin River, or for the meeting-of-the-waters.

The etymology for many of the Native American place names gets murky, as the nations/tribes that originally named a spot, were removed/displaced from that area by settlers. Some of the name associations were lost in the process. Also, most of the early explorers & settlers weren't scholars by any means, so spelling/pronounciation/word origins were pretty sketchy.
 
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Do we count translations of Indigenous words? In Minneapolis there's talk of renaming Lake Calhoun "White Earth Lake" after the Lakota name for it (the Lakota name is Mde Maka Ska).

"Turtle Island" for the Americas or North America based on the Haudonasee and related people's creation myth that the world is carried on the back of a turtle. According to Wikipedia, the name of the turtle that carries the world on its back is Hah-nu-nah in the Seneca language. I can see a successful Vinland timeline having Europeans adopt a name like this-the Norse never named all the new land in the Americas Vinland, it was a specific region and one of several regions they explored. If they permanently settled on the land, by the time they figure out they're on one large continent instead of several large islands they would be in contact with Iroquoian tribes who they may get the continent's name from.
 
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Driftless

Donor
Lake Superior = Gichi-gami

The Ojibwe call the lake gichi-gami (pronounced as gitchi-gami and kitchi-gami in other dialects),[8] meaning "be a great sea." Henry Wadsworth Longfellow wrote the name as "Gitche Gumee" in The Song of Hiawatha, as did Gordon Lightfoot in his song, "The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald". According to other sources the actual Ojibwe name is Ojibwe Gichigami ("Ojibwe's Great Sea") or Anishinaabe Gichigami ("Anishinaabe's Great Sea"). The 1878 dictionary by Father Frederic Baraga, the first one written for the Ojibway language, gives the Ojibwe name as Otchipwe-kitchi-gami (reflecting Ojibwe Gichigami). The first French explorers approaching the great inland sea by way of the Ottawa River and Lake Huron during the 17th century referred to their discovery as le lac supérieur. Properly translated, the expression means "Upper Lake," that is, the lake above Lake Huron. The lake was also called Lac Tracy (named for Alexandre de Prouville de Tracy) by 17th century Jesuit missionaries. The British, upon taking control of the region from the French in the 1760s following the French and Indian War, anglicized the lake's name to Superior, "on account of its being superior in magnitude to any of the lakes on that vast continent
 
I mean, Long Island is pretty covered in native names. Patchogue, Happauge, Cutchogue, Aquabouge (notice a pattern) A mark of a native is being able to actually pronounce them all.
 
As I remember, Puerto Ricans calls themselves borinqueños.

A number of the Pueblos in New Mexico are taking back their original names from the Catholic saint names given them by the Spanish.
 
Germans call themselves Deutsch. Maybe the United Netherlands never unite so the term "Dutch" gets applied to the Germans, and Germany is called Dutchland.
 
HINDUSTAN zindabad!

Bharata or Bharat is the older name and also accepted by the Constitution. The name of the country is stated as India ie, Bharat. Hindustan was the name that came with the Muslims. The Persians called India, Hind and from it developed Hindustan.
 
The Thai name for Thailand is Pratheṣ̄thịy.
The phonetic romanization would be Prathet Thai, which means Thai Land; Thai being the name of the dominant ethnic group. Compare with Pathet Lao and Prateh Kampuchea, which are names for Laos and Cambodia. Prathet is actually a word of Sanskrit origin. The more colloquial "native" name would be Mueang Thai. The official name for Thailand is ราชอาณาจักรไทย or Ratcha Anachak Thai meaning the Kingdom of Thai.

Having more "native" names in California would be interesting. The majority of place names seem to be of Spanish origin and are derived from the names of saints (practically every city) or local features (Fresno, Paso Robles, Salinas, Milpitas). Names of Native American origin are comparatively rare, especially compared to parts of Washington or the eastern United States. Cucamonga, Topanga, Azusa, and Tamalpais are the ones I can think of from the top of my head.

Hokkaido has a surprising number of names either directly or indirectly derived from Ainu given the attitude of the Japanese towards the Ainu. Sapporo, Sarobetsu, Asahikawa, Memanbetsu, Rebun, Rishiri, Sukoton etc. Apparently there are some place names on Honshu that are of possible Ainu origin such as Kurobe and Oyabe.

Taiwan also has a lot of "native" place names, but they're often indistinguishable from names of Chinese origin given that they went from the local aboriginal language to Hokkien then Japanese and finally today are read in Mandarin from the charaters chosen by the Japanese. Recognizably aboriginal names tend to be found on the eastern side of the island (Taroko, Taimali, Shakadang), but some like Madou survive on the more populated western side. Names that are less recognizable include Taiwan, Taoyuan, Kaoshiung, Yilan, and Wanhua. The last one is the Mandarin pronunciation of the Taiwanese Bangka, which is an aboriginal word for outrigger canoe.
 
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