Etymology and States

I'd been thinking about state manes, for some reason. I was thinking about the rhyme they taught us in school, the alphabetical rhyme, "Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas...", and it started to dawn on me that each of those four states has an Indian name, a native aboriginal language name.

That idea had sitting somewhere in my craw, and I finally went out and crunched the numbers, and tried to get a count of the native names in our states. Before looking it up, you get the feeling that there are a lot.

This is true and the numbers bear it out. Besides each of the "A" states, you have: Connecticut, Illinois, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Mississippi, Missouri, Nebraska, Ohio, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Wisonsin, and Wyoming. That's 22 total so far.

I didn't list Indiana, which is an English word meaning "land of the Indians". I also didn't list Idaho, which is most likely an Indian term, but it seems to look like a white guy made it up (invariably inspired by Indian words) and it stuck around Congress long enough to finally get used. I also didn't list Oregon, which is either formed by a misinterpreted map of an Indian word, or from the french word for "windy", "stormy". How about North and South Dakota, combining English and Indian? Same goes for New Mexico, since "Mexico" is a word from the Aztecs about a region in their lands.

That would bring the total to 28. More than half.

While we're at it, the English clock in with the next most: Delaware (from Baron De la Warr), Georgia, Maine, Maryland, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Carolina, Virginia, Washington, and West Virginia. That's 14.

We're up to 42.

Next we have the Spanish: Colorado, Florida, Montana, and Nevada.

That brings our total to 46.

Then from the French: Louisiana; and from the Austronesian Hawaiian: Hawai'i.

Up to 48.

Only two left. The first: Vermont.

Vermont has no real forbear in either English, French, or Indian. Since one of the militias that fought to keep free the area fought over by New York and New Hampshire, the area today called Vermont, was called the Green Mountain Boys, I think it's safe to say that "Vermont", when broken up like "ver-" and "mont", can be seen as roots beaning "green" and "mountain". This doesn't seem that crazy to me.

Lastly, we have California.

Many think the term is Spanish, since it's generally agreed upon that it comes from the Spanish novel Las sergas de Esplandian, written around 1500. In the novel, Calafia is the queen of an Amazonian warrior nation, and her island-kingdom, California, is one of the exotic places Cortez went searching for.

Scholars tend to agree that Montalvo, the writer, used the word "Calafia" as the name of the leader of an exotic people because the Spanish public would recognize the Arabic root "caliph", which is a leader of a group of Muslims. It would make sense to his readers.

That pretty much makes California the only US state with an Arabic etymology.