Who named America?

Ocelot's_purr

Waldseemuller is generally credited with having invented the word "America". South America and North America were named after Amerigo Vespucci in 1507. Amerigo Vespucci was an Italian explorer who was the first person to realize that the Americas were completely separate from Asia, when he mapped the eastern coast of South America in 1502. A German mapmaker named Martin Waldseemuller was the first person to print a map that used the name "America" for the New World. Waldseemuller only used the word "America" for South America. The name became popular throughout Europe. In 1538, Gerardus Mercator was the first person to make a map that included both the names "North America" and "South America" in it. [Mar 22 04 3:24 PM] Ocelot's_purr writes: I have heard that Waldseemuller used Vespucci's first name because at that time it was common to refer to people by their first name instead of their last (for example, "Michealangelo" and "Dante"). Supposedly, he came up with the word "America" from "Amerigo" by first turning "Amerigo" into its Latin version "Americus", and then he wanted to make the name feminine because most European and Asian place names were feminine, so he modified the Latin "Americus" to "America"... Or so I've been told. Mar 21 04, 2:41 PM

Senior Moments

The map is sometimes referred to as the Birth certificate of America. The 1507 map is actually a dozen different wood-block prints pieced together, with South America marked "America" in the general vicinity of Brazil, and an attenuated North America bearing the legend "Terra Ulteri' Incognita." The sections were bound in a book along with a 12-section sea chart from 1516 and "gores" of the globe (the illustrated skins that were stretched over a sphere). The map surfaced in 1901. Some 500 copies of the map were made at the time. Mar 22 04, 2:52 AM

mochyn

richard amerik http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Amerik Feb 06 06, 4:01 PM

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