[Freeciv-Dev] Re: "Americans" versus "United States"

[Paul Zastoupil <paulz@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Tue, Apr 24, 2001 at 05:50:53PM -0700, Trent Piepho wrote:
> On Wed, 25 Apr 2001, Thue wrote:
> > On Wednesday 25 April 2001 02:13, Trent Piepho wrote:
> > > On Tue, 24 Apr 2001, Paul Zastoupil wrote:
> > > > > plural=_("?plural:United States'")
> > > > >
> > > > > ?
> > > >
> > > > Probably a carry over from the US centric Civ and CivII.
> > > >
> > > > /me grumbles something about arrogant americans from .us
> > >
> > > No, it's just arrogant euros that aren't native English speakers think 
> > > that
> > > substituting "United States" for "American" will sound ok, when it 
> > > doesn't.
> > 
> > Do note my little "?". That is a question mark, exactly because I was not 
> > sure if "United States" would sound right in practice. So I ask here on the 
> > list.
> > I tried inserting "United States" in various contexts used in freeciv, and 
> > it 
> > sounded fine to me. Perhaps if you would give a counterexample instead of 
> > just calling me arrogant.
> 
> I'm not that one that brought up arrogant first.  Arrogant euros and their
> American bashing really piss me off.  Any instance where "United States" is
> used as an adjective sounds incorrect.  You also need an article with "United
> States".

I used the 'arrogant' comment, but I didn't mean to start a flame war.
"American" is bad when refering to people from the United States.  I,
myself, am from the United States, and rather proud, but I try not to
be arrogant.  So it wasn't an arrogant euro bashing, however my last
name might appear :)

It's a difficult situation, I am not sure of the best solution.  We refer
to ourselves as 'americans' but this is clearly incorrect as there are
many other 'americans' we mean to exclude when using that term.

-- 
Paul Zastoupil