Vanceism of the week: "Haitia"
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Back in the early 2000s, George W. Bush got a lot of flac for calling Greeks "Grecians" and making similar mistakes in the mapping from place names to ethnonyms.
J.D. Vance recently went the other way, mapping the ethnonym Haitians to a possible place name pronounced /ˈhej.ʃə/, as if it were spelled "Haitia":
Or maybe that shoud be "Heyshuh", as in this TikTok video.
This slip is pretty far down on the list of things for which Vance has recently been criticized, so one of the few other recent allusions to his morphological choice is buried in this Daily Show segment.
Note that an analogous backformation would be "Grecia" (= /ˈgɹi.ʃə/) from Grecian (which is the Spanish place name, but not something I've ever seen or heard in English…).
For those from other countries (or planets) who haven't been following this story, the Haitians in Springfield OH are legal immigrants, and the accusations of pet-eating are false.
Stephen Goranson said,
September 21, 2024 @ 10:58 am
Here in Durham NC a once-thriving Black business district was called Hayti.
Andrew McCarthy said,
September 21, 2024 @ 11:57 am
@Stephen Goranson
“Hayti” was an alternate spelling used for “Haiti” in English sometimes in the mid-19th century, rather like how Tokyo was sometimes spelled “Tokio”.
Stephen Goranson said,
September 21, 2024 @ 1:06 pm
Of course Hayti and Haiti are spelling variants.
What oft-bankrupt Trump & co may not know is that the term was embraced even by some not from there.
J.W. Brewer said,
September 21, 2024 @ 1:16 pm
@Stephen Goranson: Was Durham's Hayti neighborhood originally so named as an endonym (with positive implications) or an exonym (perhaps with not-so-positive implications)? I can see either being plausible … And of course the history might be ambiguous, with both endo-'s and exo-s using the toponym but not being all on the same page as to whether it was complimentary or pejorative.
J.W. Brewer said,
September 21, 2024 @ 1:26 pm
Separately, I'm pleased to discover that Sen. Vance is so learned and reactionary a fellow as to accidentally lapse into Latin toponyms when he was supposed to be speaking English for "populist" marketing reasons. https://la.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haitia
RfP said,
September 21, 2024 @ 1:34 pm
Haiti was the first country in the Western Hemisphere to free itself from chattel slavery.
I don’t know much about the history of Durham. But you can bet that there were a lot of Black people in the American South after the Civil War who were very, very proud of the people of Haiti—whose example so many had emulated by joining the Union army.
J.W. Brewer said,
September 21, 2024 @ 1:51 pm
@RfP: Sure. My question presupposes the simultaneous presence in the U.S. of positive-on-balance views of Haiti and negative-on-balance views of Haiti, not necessarily held by the same demographic groups.
RfP said,
September 21, 2024 @ 2:40 pm
@JW
Good point! I had made an assumption that might not have been warranted, but which turns out to be true, according to the Wikipedia article (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hayti,_Durham,_North_Carolina):
RfP said,
September 21, 2024 @ 2:43 pm
… I had meant to include a bit more from the Wikipedia article:
Roscoe said,
September 21, 2024 @ 3:58 pm
Shades of Cher Horowitz in “Clueless,” who gave a passionate speech in defense of Haitian refugees in which she kept referring to them as “Hay-tee-ans.” (This wasn’t scripted: actress Alicia Silverstone genuinely thought that was how “Haitians” was pronounced, and director Amy Heckerling chose not to correct her, since the mispronunciation was perfectly in character for Cher.)
AntC said,
September 21, 2024 @ 5:23 pm
Haitian/Haitia reinforces my suspicion someone is trying to lean into Asian/from Asia anti-immigrant sentiment. (A few) Asian cultures do indeed (occasionally) eat species that Americans treat as pets.
AntC said,
September 21, 2024 @ 5:58 pm
… plus Kamala's father is Jamaican. So this is a slur on both Asians and Caribbeans: viz. both Kamala's mother and father.
I'm not suggesting either Vance or Trump are smart enough to have figured this out.
Rodger C said,
September 22, 2024 @ 9:36 am
Was it Dan Quayle or someone else who called another country "Canadia"?
J.W. Brewer said,
September 22, 2024 @ 12:43 pm
Another irregular ethnonym:toponym pairing encoded in the lexicon of the fluent Anglophone is that "Alsatians" come from "Alsace." However, the more regular "Alsatia" (which AFAIK remains the standard toponym in Latin) did have come currency in English in former times and inter alia somehow became attached to a particular neighborhood in London where, in the 17th century, the ordinary mechanisms of the criminal justice system were inoperative, thus attracting residents for whom the ability to avoid apprehension was a desirable amenity. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whitefriars,_London#Alsatia Which eventually led to "Alsatia" thus having a more general slang meaning (at least in BrEng, and maybe now it's archaic even there?) distinct from European geography, sort of the same way "Bohemia" does.
Since at least in AmEng "Haitians" doesn't quite rhyme with "Asians" but does rhyme perfectly with "Alsatians," I think AntC's proposal may need to be revised to suggest that a subliminal appeal to anti-Alsatian prejudice is in the mix here. Or possibly anti-Croatian prejudice?