« Yankees vient du langage amérindien qui signifie (exterminateurs d’indiens) »

Quel langage amérindien ?

Je me contenterai de répéter ici l’opinion des linguistes professionnels :

Many faulty etymologies have been devised for the word, including one by a British officer in 1789 who said it derived from the Cherokee word eankke, meaning « coward » [on est loin de votre « exterminateurs d’indiens »] – but [manque de pot] no such word exists in Cherokee. Etymologies purporting an origin in languages of the aboriginal inhabitants of the United States are not well received by linguists. One such surmises that the word is borrowed from the Wyandot (called Huron by the French) pronunciation of the French l’anglais (meaning « the Englishman » or « the English (language) »), sounded as Y’an-gee. Writing in 1819, the Rev. John Heckewelder stated his belief that the name grew out of the attempts by Native Americans to pronounce the word English. The U.S. novelist James Fenimore Cooper supported this view in his 1841 book The Deerslayer. Linguists, however, do not support any Indian origins.

De fait, l’hypothèse la plus vraisemblable, c’est celle-ci :

Most linguists look to Dutch sources, noting the extensive interaction between the colonial Dutch in New Netherland (now largely New York State, New Jersey, Delaware and western Connecticut) and the colonial English in Massachusetts, Rhode Island and eastern Connecticut. The Dutch given names Jan and Kees were and still are common, and the two sometimes are combined into a single name, Jan Kees (in the Netherlands the name Jan Kees is still common, e.g. Jan Kees de Jager). The word Yankee is a variation that could have referred to English settlers moving into previously Dutch areas.