Indios is a reference to the Indies. You’re confused because the Spanish word for “Indian” is “Indios.” But it comes from “India.” Breaking it into two words is mere urban legend.
“East is east and west is west and if you take cranberries and stew them like applesauce they taste much more like prunes than rhubarb does.” – Marx
Read “Sundials” in the new issue of Aboriginal Science Fiction. www.sff.net/people/rothman
Okay here is the root as far as I can trace it.
INDIANS, from
INDIOS, Spanish for “people from the country of India”, from
INDIA, Latin for “the country beyond the Indus River” (India is called “Bharat” by the people who live there), from
SINDHU, an older name for that same area, and the original name for the Indus river.
“Hindu” is related to “Sindhu”.
The attempt to get “Indios” from “In Dios”, does not wash. Spanish was not even a language when the Romans were calling the area east of the Indus, “India”.
The root of all of these terms is “Sind” or “Ind”. As you see the “-ios” ending is an artifact of Spanish, and not part of the original term.
Spanish conquistadors may have choosen to make the connection. I don’t know how good their linguistic anthropology skills were tho. False derivations are a dime a dozen in popular culture. I once aked a Spanish speaking woman why stockings were called “medias”, she thought (she was bi-lingual) that it was because they were “made (-ias)” of nylon. In fact, they simply were named back when they came up to the middle of the leg. Middle=media
That is the beauty of linguistics (at least for the written languages) it is based on written proof, and is highly emperical. Better than detective fiction.
So - the word really comes from “In Dios” or should we ignore the 2000 years of map making that often referred to that area as “India”?
You’ve lost me here…
And to beat a dead horse - India wasn’t called “India” in India, because:
This misundertanding is similar to saying, “It’s not Kirghizia, it’s Kirghistan, you dummy. It’s not Poland, it’s Polska, or it’s Polonia.” Two (or three) language variants of the same name.
Well, I’m not going to believe the English word ‘Indian’ came from the Spanish indio. It certainly was just the usual sort of English shortening of what was probably the Latin Indianus, -ana, or whatever, that referred to whatever came from what the Romans and cartographers termed India, just as English refers to something as American, rather than the Neo-Latin Americanus, -ana or whatever. Certainly, it was just in parallel that the Spanish used their own versions of the same words, India and indi[an]o -a, as they do America and americano, -a or Italia and italiano, -a, except, for some reason, they left the -an- out, in the case of indio, -a. (But then there’s Indiana. Hoosier source on that one?) And besides, ‘-an’ isn’t really the English nationality suffix; ‘-ish/-sh/-ch’ is. (So canned clams come right off the shelf. . .because they’re shelfish.) And Santa hangs out in Gdansk, 'cause he’s North Polish.
And, of course, Columbus wasn’t Italian; he was Genoese, because there wasn’t any Italy at the time.
And ‘native’ or ‘indigenous’ doesn’t necessarily mean ‘aboriginal’ – the first of its kind in a given place; it can mean simply locally born.
But it’s OK to call Muskegon ‘Burger King’. Just don’t call San Francisco ‘Frisco’; the latter’s in Texas.
Yes, of course, Amerinds didn’t have any name for themselves collectively, because they weren’t collective, as a whole, and essentially none of them had met any other races, except Inuits, in the case of those in the north, and I doubt they got very heavily into grouping their tribes collectively by name in opposition to the Inuits.
And so now we have to call Asiatic Indians (non-Pakistani-non-Bangladeshi South Asians) ‘East Indians’, although they’re not from the East Indies (Indonesia) and may even be from western India? And aren’t Canadians Americans? And aren’t mexicanos actually norteamericanos? And if the West Indies are the Antilles (Greater and Lesser – my dictionary excuses the Bahamas from either), don’t the East Indies rate in that hierarchy?
And if Polska isn’t Polonia, how come Rossiya seems to be so Latinate? And why is St.-Petersburg a burg now, instead of a -grad?
But the real scoop is that Native Americans were named after a motorcycle. (I know, that’s Harley believable, but it’s either that or they were named after that football team Stanford used to have. Yeah, and it could be all Greek to everyone, having come from Indianapolis.)
Ray (californiano (nátivo, pero no indígena/aborigen), pero no californio.) (De dios no me fío. Ni “in dios”.)
Actually, it means “river.”
As previously posted in this thread.
Have a nice day. 
[sarcasm] Of course they’ve always been here; their legends say so. Are you trying to deny the validity of their culture?[/sarcasm] :rolleyes:
Nano - you’re making me work too hard…
INDIANS comes from INDIOS, in that that is the translation of the word from one language to another. The word INDIANS already existed for inhabitants of the subcontinent.
I did not seek to derive INDIANS (the word for people of India) from INDIOS (the Spanish word for people of India). However, the USAGE of the term was first IN SPANISH for inhabitents of the Americas (North and South I might add). Thus we have the use of INDIOS, then INDIANS in English.
http://sarasvati.simplenet.com/Indian%20Lexicon/sarastemplate1.htm
Here is a link about the term SINDHU - thanks for the note above about the primary meaning of the word. SO it goes like this. Alexanders armies arrive at what is now the Indus River (the English name…) and ask, “what is that called?” The locals answer “SINDHU”, not necessarily in ignorance of the question, as it may be the local name of the river as well as meaning “river” in general. The rest is history. This is similar to all of the rivers in Europe with Don- or Dn- prefixes (and variations), Dn- related to the root for “river” in the slavic family of languages. Danube, Don, Dniester, Dnieper, etc.
Russiya is not “Latinate” in suffix. It is Indo-European in suffix. You might note that the old term is simply RUS, for the people and the land.
As far as St. Petersburg is concerned. I am perplexed. A few years ago I heard of the name change back to “St. Petersburg” and wondered why it was not “Petrograd”. Ws this the ignorant American monoligual press?
A search on Map Quest reveals the cities “Moskva” (accurate transliteration) and “Sankt-Peterburg”. So the answer is that it is neither “St. Petersburg” NOR “Petrograd”.
Looks like a Russian transliteration of a German name to me. Makes sense, the builders were hopeless G-E-R-M-A-N-O-P-H-I-L-E-S.
aND TO BEAT THAT HORSE AGAIN -
“And if Polska isn’t Polonia…”
The point is that it IS, in another language - it was sarcasm.
To spell it out - Polska=Polonia, Indios=Indians, etc. When you translate.
Now do we want to talk about “Roma”…? (Gypsies)
" ‘-an’ isn’t really the English nationality suffix; ‘-ish/-sh/-ch’ is."
NOT. Northumbrian, Canadian, etc. It varies with the root. In English and Spanish too. For example in Spanish it is often -io, but don’t forget -eco (Guatamalteco) and -ense (Salvadorense).
Well, geez, I don’t know of any other Florida cities that go by Ruskie names.
Okay, smart-aleckness out of the way, let me throw in my own (probably wildly inaccurate) $.02.
“The City of St. Peter” was known popularly as “St. Petersburg” in Russia until World War I (by ‘popularly’ I mean both by non-Russians as well as by Russians). At the beginning of World War I, Russia, like many Allied powers, went through a bit of anti-German hysteria, and officially changed the name of the city to “Petrograd” as a ‘true Russian’ name as opposed to the Germanic -burg ending of “St. Petersburg.” (For an American example of this, sauerkraut became ‘Liberty Cabbage.’)
The city was later re-named Leningrad to honor Communist leader V.I. Lenin (as well as to get rid of a religious reference in an atheistic government); following the fall of Communism, the city decided to return to it’s ‘traditional’ name of St. Petersburg (the name it had been known as for a few centuries before the ten-year switch to Petrograd).
JMCJ
Just confirming that my ass is, in fact, the wisest part of my body.
Actually in our schools in India, we are taught that the word India is derived from ‘Indigo’ a pigment of pure blue that is only found in the south. For centuries, it was this blue that tinted all the Arabic and Chinese porcelain ‘blue’. The tiles in the mosque in Samarkand, are also baked with this blue.
India is not called Hindustan (land of the Hindu’s) by anyone here except Hindu fundamentalists. It is a name given us by the Afghani and Persian’s.
India is called ‘Bharat’ (pronounced Baha-rut) inside India and in all court and government literature. It’s taken from ancient India’s emperor Ashoka kingdom. That’s the guy that tried to unify India – many moons ago…
INDIGO from Sp. or Pg. INDICO from Latin INDIGUS > “from India”, from Gk. INDIKON > “Indic” meaning from India. So back on thread we see from the dictionary (of all lowly sources) that the word “Indikon” is greek, predating Latin. That puts it at least to the time of Alexander.
And checking the derivation od “INDIA” proper, I have a revision to my earlier thread - adding two steps between the source and the Latin…
INDIA (Latin) from
INDOS (Greek) from
HINDU (old Persian) from
SINDHU (Sanskrit)
One might surmise that the crossover was almost instantaneous from O. Persian to Greek - when Persian guides to Alexander accompanied their recent conqueror to the eastern extent of their former territory, and told hime what this area to the east was called.
Usually commodity names come from areas, occassionally the other way around.
Tyrian purple (dye)
China (or Japan Ware in UK)
Cordovan (leather)
Parchment (paper from Pergamum - see how Anglos can mangle a word)
Hamburger…etc.
While this thread has been fun, I suggest the OP consult a dictionary with derivations - it is the single most reliable source for traces of cultural transmission - relatively free of politics that liguistic anthropology is.
Yeah, sure you did, breaux. I remember reading that joke thirty years ago in Reader’s Digest.
Joke, Wendall. Attempt at humor. Doubt seriously if the city fathers would let me rename their town. Plagiarism? Oh, yeah, but a little bit older than Readers Digest. I think it comes from the Book of Exodus.
Regarding my original post, thanks to everyone (almost) for the assistance. I appreciate it.