Authors' Note: les États-Unis (lay zay-TAH-zoo-nee, or as here, lay ZAY-tah-zoo-nee): French for '(the) United States'
compris (com-PREE): French for 'understood' or 'included'
os Estados Unidos, the name in Portuguese, here using the rhyming properties of the Brazilian dialect [OHS, etc.]
huddled masses: a phrase from Emma Lazarus's 1903 "The New Colossus", a sonnet that is engraved at the base of New York's Statue of Liberty.
The United States of America, or USA (capital — Washington, D.C.), initally formed in 1781 by merger of the thirteen colonies along the Atlantic coastline of British North America, has a Constitution dating from 1787, but no declared official language; English (American) is the de facto language of use. Millions of native speakers of French, Spanish and Portuguese (not to mention Canadian and other variants of English) make their homes elsewhere in the Americas; also, due to intermittently open immigration policies, significant linguistic minorities of foreign language speakers are now scattered through, and contribute to the cultural landscape of the United States, or US. Italian, a major linguistic influence, has exerted its role there primarily through immigration from Europe, as no Italian colonies have ever been established in the Americas.
The authors acknowledge substantial inspiration by OEDILFian prodigy speedysnail's "country" verses.
compris (com-PREE): French for 'understood' or 'included'
os Estados Unidos, the name in Portuguese, here using the rhyming properties of the Brazilian dialect [OHS, etc.]
huddled masses: a phrase from Emma Lazarus's 1903 "The New Colossus", a sonnet that is engraved at the base of New York's Statue of Liberty.
The United States of America, or USA (capital — Washington, D.C.), initally formed in 1781 by merger of the thirteen colonies along the Atlantic coastline of British North America, has a Constitution dating from 1787, but no declared official language; English (American) is the de facto language of use. Millions of native speakers of French, Spanish and Portuguese (not to mention Canadian and other variants of English) make their homes elsewhere in the Americas; also, due to intermittently open immigration policies, significant linguistic minorities of foreign language speakers are now scattered through, and contribute to the cultural landscape of the United States, or US. Italian, a major linguistic influence, has exerted its role there primarily through immigration from Europe, as no Italian colonies have ever been established in the Americas.
The authors acknowledge substantial inspiration by OEDILFian prodigy speedysnail's "country" verses.
Readers of this blogpost might note that the verse and notes in total give thirteen different names for today's country of interest, matching the original number of colonies that banded together. (Apologies are made to aboriginal groups, who could not be included in the discussion owing to lack of space.)
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