I am reading the multi-lingual instructions on a new piece of office equipment (Dymo labelmaker). At the bottom is the standard copyright and contact information. One line intrigues me:
Made in USA/ Fabrique aux EE-UU/Hecho en E.U.
(bolding mine)
I know the French word for the US is États-Unis, but why the doubling of the letters E and U?
Does this occur in other languages? I’m sure I’ve seen it before on a product from Mexico (parts made in the US, product assembled in Mexico, then re-shipped to the US), but the phrase in Spanish as shown above does not use the doubled letters.
Spanish for “United States” is “Estados Unidos”. I was taught in all my Spanish classes to abbreviate it as “E.E.U.U.”. They told me that they do that to convey the pluralness of the phrase, but that seems kind of silly to me.
I just noticed last week that the Spanish signs in the post office abbreviated Estadois Unidos as “EE UU”. This must be new – they didn’t teach us that back in my high school Spanish classes.
My high school French teacher told us that’s done because “E.U.” is more commonly understood in France to mean “Europe Unis” (United Europe), a term with a lot of political emotion behind it, although perhaps less so now. “EE.UU” is a little clumsy, but has the untrumpable advantage of being generally understood to mean États Unis. Of course, “U.S.A.” would be even less clumsy - but that would mean using an English term :).
When I was living in Brazil (over 10 years ago) a large number of consumer products came from Bolivia. You could identify them by several differences in packaging. One of the give away clues was EEUU. Brazilians use EUA. So its use dates at least 10 years. I would guess, given the tradition of pluralization of acronyms in Spanish, the usage goes back a long ways.
>> My high school French teacher told us that’s done because “E.U.” is more commonly understood in France to mean “Europe Unis” (United Europe), a term with a lot of political emotion behind it
Well, I don’t speak French and I am sure someone will correctly if I am wrong but I believe that is not correct French or even comes close to being correct. So maybe your teacher was an impostor or your memory isn’t that good.
sailor is correct in that the French for “European Union” is L’Union européenne, which appreviates to “UE” . I’ve never come across “EU” used to stand for l’Europe unie (a united Europe, as oppoesed to the European Union), even in French newspaper articles on the subject of EU integration.
Note that there is an equivalent to this phenomenon in English: in bibliographies you will often see two lower case p’s to indicate a plural number of pages, as in pp.30-32. I have also seen this done with the letter l for lines in a poem, as in ll. 6-7, or with the letter v for verses in the Bible.
Perhaps it’s a way of distinguishing between the European Union (EU) vs les Etats Unis (formerly EU, now EEUU). So prior to the creation of the European Union, “EU” was accepted as the Latin “United States”.
But then those guys on the other side of the Atlantic got together and screwed things up, then realized “Made in EU/Fabrique en EU” would create confusion (especially for taxation and import/export regulations), so the new term was formed.
I have no cite for this… I’m actually just making an educated guess. If I find something, I’ll be back and post it.
They seem to have confused French and Spanish abreviations. In Spanish, doubling the letter does refer to a plural, but not in French. In French it’s usually E-U, with a dash, although the abreviation isn’t used quite as often (I believe) as US/USA is used in English.
Negative in the case of Spanish. There the use of “EE UU” (with variation on the placement of the periods) far antedates any hint of a European Union (and as pointed out in Spanish and French the latter would be “UE”). From readings of older books and papers I have picked up that apparently it USED to be the standard style, maybe even an academy rule, that if the singular were abbreviated with a single initial, the plural be abbreviated with a double initial. As in: “Los fundadores de la orden religiosa fueron los Hermanos Juan y Manuel” (“The founders of the religious order were Brothers John and Immanuel”) you would get an abbreviation: “los HH Juan y Manuel”, since the singular would be H. Juan, H. Manuel. I strongly suspect a holdover from (real) Latin grammar. This has since changed, and depending on what the university your Spanish teacher attended (and when) you may end up being taught to abbreviate it EE.UU., E.U.A., or E.U. (or to prefer to write it out).
The OP’s label, who knows, may have been printed and attached by people who don’t understand either of the two romance languages included.
Well, nobody wants to go to links anymore because:
You usually get 3 popup windows (only 1 in this case)
You usually get half a dozen cookies, like doubleclick.net, etc which keep track of everywhere you have been and gather and store info on you (only 2 in this case - and no known insidious ones)
So, the best way to do it is to include the link and summarize or quote what is said there.
Okay, so it seems to be a question of either a change in Spanish grammar or a typo in French, or both.
As I stated, I had seen the double letters in Spanish, but (and on re-reading I find I forgot to post this part), not in French. I find any of these explanations to be plausible, and I appreciate the help of the TMs. Thanks!
