How come so many continents, countries, states, etc. have names that start with A and end with A? For example, the continents: Asia, Antartica, America, Africa. Countries: Armenia, Argentina, Angola. States: Alabama, Alaska, Arizona.
What is it about naming land so often with A…a? It cannot be by sheer chance - there must be a conspiracy to use all those A’s! and to what end?
Is it an anomoly of the English language, or is it independant of native language?
I’m glad Abba is not a country. But it could be next.
-ia is a latin suffix that means “country, province, or region of”
Once yoi know that, it isn’t surprising to find that there really aren’t that many region names that begin with A and end with a by comparison. Look at a list of country names.
Estonia, Lithuania, Bulgaria, Georgia, Namibia, et cetera.
Nope, it’s definitely language related–particularly Indo-European. -a was the common feminine singular ending in the Nominative case for Latin and Greek. This placed the -a on several of the words. Then Spanish and Portuguese are Romance (i.e., derived from the Latin languange of the Romans) and they added a couple. Even Alaska is the Anglicized transliteration of the Russian name–and Russian is an Indo-European language, (the original Aleut word ended in a k sound). Alabama should have escaped that situation, as the Creek word ended in an s sound, but the white settlers were so usd to ending their names in -a by that time that they dropped the final -s.
Then English tended to pick up the habit of using “latinized” spellings for words with those origins. For example, what we call Austria is known as Österreich on the streets of Salzburg.
Since -a is going to be the closing of a lot of names, it is simply coincidence that a certain number of them are going to also begin with a A.
(I will agree that the prevalence of A—a constructions for nearly all the continents is a bit weird. You forgot Australia.)
Alright, -ia means “country, province, or region of,” but when you eliminate all the lands that end with -ia, you still have a planetfull of A…a names. Alaska, Alabama, Arizona don’t seem to have -ia in them. America, Africa, Antartica, don’t have the -ia ending.
OR, is -ica, -ska, -ama, -ona, all mutilations of -ia?
Why all the states that start with A in the first place?
How come the USA does not have a smattering of state names that start with E and end with e? Or start with I and end with I, or more than one that starts with O and ends with O? Or states that start with J and end with J.
Anybody who watches Wheel of Fortune knows that the letter A is not the most common letter. Common letters are RSTE, etc. (or something like that).
I believe the most common letters are ETAOIN SHRDLU, in that order. So A is number 3.
And the A__a thing gets really annoying when you play the game where each person names a place starting with the last letter of the previous place named. It gets stuck in an A rut for a while, until someone can think of something unusual.
Maybe you shouldn’t rely too much on Wheel of Fortune for your every-day language needs. A, being a vowel, is a pretty common letter. Names ending in -a is not at all rare. It’s a suffix, as mentioned already (along with -ia, etc.). Now all you need is a word that begins with the letter a. Again, this is not a rarity. Put the two together and we have an uncanny coincidence. Well, not really. Just a coincidence.
There are also plenty of places that begin with a C and end with an -a: China, Croatia, Colombia, Canada, Costa Rica, Cuba, Cambodia, California, Canberra, etc.
See my earlier post about the “a” suffix. An “a” prefix can also indicate possession, i.e. “from”.
-ica is another matter. I’m no Latin scholar, but I believe it means something like “the study of”. I suppose it could be a variation of -ia. I beleive the similarity in continent names refers to direction.
Asia - from the east
Africa - from the southwest
Australia - from the south
Antarctica - from the southern pole
America - a variation of Amerigo, so the legend goes.
I’ll have to do some research, but I believe our resident latin scholars will pop in before too long.
Lots of time when people name a company they want it to be at the top of listings, as in the yellow pages. I once knew of a furniture manufacturer named Aardvark Furn. Everyone has known of a company named A1 or AAA. So using that line of thinking all these countries, states, etc. would get top listing whether you spell them forwards or backwards.
“Antarctica” got his name from “Arctic” (the north pole region) and the prefix “anti”, meaning “against” or “opposite”; it’s simply on the other end of the world than the Arctic, which got its name from arktos, Greek for “bear”, referring to the twon Bear constellations in the northern sky.
“Australia” was named AFAIK by Cook as an allusion to the legendary Terra Australis continent
I admitted that I was going from memory there. I checked other sources and followed up with a link that said essetnially the same thing (read the link I submitted following that post):
Asia - from the Assyrian “asu” which literally means “sunrise” - indicating east Africa - I was slightly off on this one. If comes from an Arabic word for “afar” which the Romans coopted. To them Africa meant what is currently referred to as Tunisia which is southwest of Rome. Actually, the Romans called the whole continent of Africa “Ethiopia”. Australia - a shortening of Terre Australis - land to south Antarctica - Arctic was originally a of Greek origin that meant “bear” and referred to the northern wastes.“Ant-” means opposite of.
