[AT] OT don't take any Buffalo Nickels

[James Peck]

I suspect the Canadian government is behind the effort to use the term “Bison”. I am OK with that. French and Spanish both have government agencies in the home countries to regulate those languages. English, to my knowledge, does not.



The first mass migration of English speakers into Canada was of American Loyalists fleeing the American Revolution. I bet they said “Buffalo”. I do not know if Buffalo/Bison ranged as far east as the east coast of Canada.



The Spanish language long used the letter n with a diacritic mark, I have heard it called "enya" ñ. Twenty or so years ago I read an article, in English, that the agency in Spain that defines the Spanish language was phasing out the ñ. Well, Italian uses the gn combination to do the same thing and Portuguese uses nh. To my knowledge, Doña Ana County, New Mexico, has not changed the spelling of their name.



In my thirties, I was told of some of my family roots in the Nieuw Nederland colony. After the joint English/American forces invaded and took that colony over, it became English speaking. This was before the Act of Union so the term British would be incorrect.  Some used their new citizenship to move into other American colonies. I do not know of any treaty guaranteeing any Dutch linguistic rights.



A Dutch immigrant I had some knowledge of said that they were taught in school that the Netherlands had sold New York.



https://www.newnetherlandinstitute.org/education/for-students/fun-re/what-was-new-netherland/what-was-new-netherland/



[Indiana Robinson] <snip> I find this discussion a little surprising... I was taught in about the 6th grade (in a small rural school in the 1950's) that what we all call buffalo are really scientifically true bison and that early explorers were just guessing as to what they were. It was much like them thinking at first that this was the far side of the world and them calling everybody "Indians". The name just stuck and so did buffalo. Even back when I was in school it was understood that most people would probably always continue to call them buffalo in casual conservation and I still do. By the time I learned that they were really bison I had already learned the words dog, cat, cow etc. and bison was a strange sounding name to me. <snip>
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