О "САСШ" и правильных и неправильных названиях стран

Origins and history of the word

Early usage

The origins of the term are uncertain, and speculation abounds. In 1758, British General James Wolfe made the earliest recorded use of the word Yankee to refer to people from what was to become the United States, referring to the New England soldiers under his command as Yankees: "I can afford you two companies of Yankees, and the more because they are better for ranging and scouting than either work or vigilance."[4] Later British use of the word often was derogatory, as in a cartoon of 1775 ridiculing "Yankee" soldiers.[4] New Englanders themselves employed the word in a neutral sense: the "Pennamite-Yankee War", for example, was the name given to a series of clashes in 1769 over land titles in Pennsylvania, in which the "Yankees" were the Connecticut claimants.
[edit] Faulty theories

Many faulty etymologies have been devised for the word, including one by a British officer in 1789 who said it derived from the Cherokee word eankke, meaning "coward" — but no such word exists in Cherokee.[5] Etymologies purporting an origin in languages of the aboriginal inhabitants of the United States are not well received by linguists. One such surmises that the word is borrowed from the Wyandot (called Huron by the French) pronunciation of the French l'anglais (meaning "the Englishman" or "the English (language)"), sounded as Y'an-gee.[5][6] Writing in 1819, the Rev. John Heckewelder stated his belief that the name grew out of the attempts by Native Americans to pronounce the word English.[5] The U.S. novelist James Fenimore Cooper supported this view in his 1841 book The Deerslayer. Linguists, however, do not support any Indian origins.[5]
[edit] Dutch origins
New Netherland is to the northwest, New England is to the northeast

Most linguists look to Dutch sources, noting the extensive interaction between the colonial Dutch in New Netherland (now largely New York state, New Jersey, Delaware and western Connecticut) and the colonial English in Massachusetts, Rhode Island and eastern Connecticut. The Dutch given names Jan and Kees were and still are common, and the two sometimes are combined into a single name, Jan-Kees. The word Yankee is a variation that could have referred to English settlers moving into previously Dutch areas.[5]

Michael Quinion and Patrick Hanks argue[7] that the term refers to the Dutch nickname and surname Janneke (from Jan and the diminutive -eke, meaning "Little John" or Johnny in Dutch), Anglicized to Yankee (the Dutch J is pronounced as a Y in English) and "used as a nickname for a Dutch-speaking American in colonial times". By extension, the term could have grown to include non-Dutch colonists as well.

H. L. Mencken[8] explained the derogatory term John Cheese was often applied to the early Dutch colonists, who were famous for their cheeses. An example would be a British soldier commenting on a Dutch man "Here comes a John Cheese". The Dutch translation of John Cheese is Jan Kaas; the two words thus would sound somewhat like Yahn-kees and could have given birth to the present term.