The original names of the -americas??? Did they have any???

[arr&bee]

Gang this is not a trivia question because i truly don't know,but since today is the birthday of the nation known as-the united states of america,i've been thinking about if the continent had a name prior to the arrival of outsiders,now many native tribes occupied different regions of course,did they have a name for the continent as a whole?? Anyone?

[144man]

I don't think the native tribes shared a common language, so on that basis there wouldn't have been a common name for the American continent. I also wonder if the tribes would have had enough knowledge of American geography to have developed the concept of a continent.

[arr&bee]

I'm sure that they had names for their regions,i'm gonna do some more checking though.

[robb_k]

I don't think the native tribes shared a common language, so on that basis there wouldn't have been a common name for the American continent. I also wonder if the tribes would have had enough knowledge of American geography to have developed the concept of a continent.
15998
I don't think they could have. So, it would have been impossible to have a name for North America or South America, or the 2 continents as a whole. There were several different language groups, which corresponded to the different, time/era-separated waves of migration from out of Asia, and the early breaking off of population segments from the larger groups, after reaching The Americas. There WAS some borrowing from language to language, of geographical names, but that was a very small amount, and only would have involved a few tribes in small regions. There couldn't possibly be a name for all of The Americas, together, or the 2 continents, individually, because no one circumnavigated the whole area, and the tribes in the coastal areas didn't share information with tribes outside their area, and geographical information couldn't get from the extremities of one region, to all the other regions.

[arr&bee]

Absolutely robb, you just answered my question it is one of those things that i think about from time to time,robb you are ...the guru of sdf!