Georgia the southern U.S. state with its capital in Atlanta is obviously distinct from the Georgia ex Soviet Republic which is now at war with Russia. My question is, in light of the war, a trivial one, still, are there any other states or provinces with such similar names? I’m not talking about mere cities, of which there are many ones with similar names. (Moscow Russia /Moscow Idaho, Paris France /Paris Texas etc). I’m asking about states or provinces.
Republic of the Congo and the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
Lots of them, and not merely the “two states both named after a shared geogrphical feature” of the two Congos.
[ul][li]Iberia 1. The roughly square peninsula containing Spain and Portugal. 2. The ancient nation at the eastern end of the Black Sea that was legendarily home to the Golden Fleece, located approximately where Abkhazia is today.[/li][li]Galicia 1. The autonomous region in northwest Spain roughly due north of Portugal. 2. The former Austro-Hungarian region of Poland surrounding Krakow.[/li][li]Albania 1. The English and other western name for Shqiperia, on the Adriatic Balkan coast between Montenegro and the Epirus region of Greece. 2. The Latin form for “Albany”, an old name for the Scottish kingdom (not Scotland as we know it today, but the area centered on the Lowlands.[/li][li]Holland 1. A former county and now two provinces of the Kingdom of the Netherlands, often used synonymously with that kingdom. 2. Central Lincolnshire, England.[/li][li]New England 1. The six United States located northeast of New York. 2. A region in inland northern New South Wales, with a characteristic culture.[/ul][/li]
And that’s just off the top of my head.
The West Indies and the East Indies?
Macedonia, which is why Greece wants (demands, really) everyone to use FYROM (Former Yugoslav Republic Of Macedonia) when they’re talking about the country as opposed to the region of Greece. Names are Serious Business. :rolleyes:
Colombia (country) and about a million different counties, cities, regions and such in North America named “Columbia”?
Galicia, the province of Spain, and Galicia, the area of Eastern Europe now split between Poland and Ukaine.
ETA: duh, I apparently need more sleep, because I missed the post above.
Does Mexico and New Mexico count? People get them confused all the time. “Do you speak Spanish?” “Are you a citizen of the USA?”
Michoacán and Michigan are pretty damn close.
At the county level there’s Suffolk County in the UK and Suffolk County in the US, but there are several English County names that were used for US counties.
During the Roman Empire the area we now know as Georgia was called Iberia, which was also the name of the Spanish peninsula.
Those tricky Georgians! They’ve been sowing this sort of confusion for centuries!
Washington the state and Washington the city often have to be identified.
Maybe not that much of a similarity, but the region which roughly corresponds to today’s Moldova used to be known as Bessarabia for a long time, although not at all being in Arabia.
The republics of Guinea, Guinea Bissau, and Equatorial Guinea in Africa, and the island of New Guinea to the north of Australia.
Just my 21 shillings.
Growing up in New Jersey, I always thought of New Brunswick as the NJ city that’s the headquarters of Johnson and Johnson, and the home of Rutgers University. It really throws me when people outside New Jersey use it, because they invariably mean the Canadian province.
There aree plenty of towns in the US with the same name, of course, but when a city shares a name with a state, it throws you. Like the case of Indiana, Pennsylvania: Indiana, Pennsylvania - Wikipedia
There’s Montana the state in the US, and Montana the province (as well as city of the same name that is the seat of the province) in Bulgaria.
(Introductory balalaika music)
(singing with heavy Russian accent)
*Moskva…proved too much for the man (too much for the man)
So he is leaving the life he has come to know
He said he is going back to find what’s left of his world
The world he left so long ago.
So he’s leaving on that midnight train to (Caucasian) Georgia…*
Nitpick: ‘county’ is never included in the British names, with the exception of County Durham.
I only choose to nitpick this one because I’m from Suffolk 
It’s probably also worth pointing out that Suffolk has Essex to the south and Norfolk to the north, while Suffolk County has Essex County to the north and Norfolk County to the south!
This drives me crazy.
In the San Francisco bay area, there are:
-
Richmond, a city in the East Bay.
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Richmond, a district in San Francisco.
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Castro Valley, a town, I believe, in the East Bay.
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The Castro, a district in San Francisco.
Each of these like-named areas are separated by the entire bay, yet both are mentioned frequently in the news and seldom specifically identified. I always have to stop and think “Wait - there are lots of gang shootings in the Richmond district of SF? Oh, they must mean Richmond, in the East Bay, of course.”
Bessarabia was in turn named after a locality in it named Basarab, which I think has nothing to do with the purported descendants of Ishmael 1000 miles southeast.