A Short Treatise

On the Naming of the Western Countries

By James Sweeney, Professor of Philology

King’s College, Manhattan

The name Arkady, a curious diminutive of the word Arcadia, is a direct result of the early exploration of the continent. When Cristoforo Columbo disappeared on his second voyage, Iberian explorations of the Western Hemisphere stalled for nearly a decade. This allowed the first landing on the northern continent to fall to Manuel Palaiologos, sailing for the Ottoman Navy. Despite his Turkish employers, Palaiologos was nephew of Constantine XI and enjoyed a happy childhood in the short-lived Kingdom of Morea in the central Peloponnese. Oft referred to as Arcadia, this region apparently hosted a unique dialect of late medieval Greek, where the name of the place was pronounced Arkady. While this particular manner of speaking has since gone extinct, it lives on in the name that great explorer chose to give the land he discovered beyond the horizon.

The House of Castile and Aragon eventually sent an expedition to retrace the route of the vanished Colombo. This group encountered only the suspicious and hostile Taíno People on the islands where Colombo had described natives as “fearful and timid” ("son asi temerosos sin remedio"). This change in the natives' demeanor is likely a result of their exposure to Colombo, and to this day outsiders are not welcome among the Arawak-speaking islands of the Carribean. Put off by these encounters, the fleet turned southwest and arrived at the southern continent which still bears the name Colombia today. A variation of this with a ‘U’ in place of the second ‘O’ is sometimes used as a collective, poetic term for the whole of the Western Hemisphere, as in the “Columbia Arcadia” appellation used for the Republic of Arkady by aspiring scholars with more pretense than sense.

It seems Genovese captains sailing under foreign flags have a propensity to get lost, so while the English like to stress to importance of John (Giovanni) and Sebastian (Sebastiano) Cabot (Caboto) in the early exploration of the continent, their failures to return from expeditions meant the settlement of Arkday was really an Ottoman affair until the destruction of the Turkish exploration fleet by a combined English, Gaulish and Dutch force at the Pillars of Hercules. After this the English mostly had a free hand to establish colonies north of the Grand River of Tey-Sha. Despite it’s vast land holdings in Europe and Levant, the Sultanate could never really again claim to be a great maritime or colonial power and is now a shadow of its former glory.

When the Colonies gained their independence and redubbed themselves the Republic of Arkady, the English Crown began to insist their remaining holdings in the new world be referred to only as Albionoria (or England of the North) in both official records and common parlance. Similarly, after the loss of Tey-Sha to a group of English-speaking rebels who eventually elected to join the Republic, the European rulers of the lands south of Grand River (who have themselves rebranded their family and country names many times) declared their territory be referred to only as Nueva Iberia, or the even more awkward Virreinato de Nueva Hispania.

Most of what remains on the map are place names derived from the names of explorers or statesmen, or names taken entirely from the tongue of the continent's native inhabitants. Ironically, when translated, these names by-in-large just mean some variation of “this place” in the many languages of the diverse peoples of the continent. This brings us to perhaps the most contentious and simultaneously least important name of Arkady’s neighbors: The Nations.

While Colombo insisted on wrongly referring to the natives of this vast continent as “Indians” he was not active in the colonization long enough to spread his error. Consequently the terms “Native,” “Indigenous” and “First Peoples” became the predominant ways of referring to the societies to which this land first belonged. The derived words,“Tribe” (from the latin Tribus, denoting the subdivisions in the population of Quirites) and “Nation” (from the verb meaning to be born) came into common usage for the collective bodies the native peoples lived in. Naturally, when the brutal Great Western War forced the Frontier Treaty on the Republic, the term “The Nations” was used in both the treaty itself and in the negotiations surrounding it to describe the lands west of the Frontier and the people who reside there. Objections to this term were almost immediate in both political and intellectual spheres.

“They are not united,” say some, “without a central government it is wrong to describe them by any name other than their individual tribal designations. An Ojibwae is an Ojibwae and a Commanche is a Commanche; nothing more!” they argue.

“They have shown themselves capable of uniting in both war and diplomacy,” say others, “the name ‘The Nations’ undermines the power of our neighbor to the west and the threat they pose. This state should be referred to as ‘THE Nation’” some claim.

This whole debate is undoubtedly meaningless to those actually living beyond the Frontier as they likely still communicate mostly in their native tongues. And according to the few reports coming across the border, so do immigrants from the Republic allowed to settle there. What name they use to describe that land in the many languages spoken in the plains, deserts, mountains and forests of that vast space is likely both unknown and unknowable to we people of the East.