Tuesday, July 29, 2014

"Foreign" Words, Four


[We are the nation of immigrants, quite literally.  America created the word in 1789.]

       But there are the people who are not immigrants into this country.  They are, of course, the American Indians, Native Americans.  From their languages, English borrowed the names for 26 states from "Massachusetts" to the "Dakotas."  There are also thousands of place names we latecomers simply took over, rivers, for example, such as the Potomac, the Susquehanna, and the great Mississippi (Chippewa Indian mici sibi "big river").   Want to turn in any of these names?


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