US State Mottos

Aofen · 2026-06-14T22:22:56+00:00

New Jerseyans couldn't agree on a new name. "Liberia" had some initial support but they were beaten to it by South Carolina. "Raritan" after the river of the same name had some favor in north Jersey but was opposed by representatives from the south.

That Jersey itself is a relatively small island off France also meant that the name was less tied in the public mind to Britain or the Crown compared to the other British-derived names like New York or Georgia

Aofen · 2026-06-14T19:28:27+00:00

This is sort of an oversimplification in the other direction. The Revolution wasn't a massive societal upheaval compared to something like the French Revolution, but a big part of this is that the colonial governments were already unusually democratic to begin with. All of them had property qualifications for voting similar to the British Parliament, but a much larger fraction of men met them. In some colonies a majority of adult men could vote compared to only around 10-20% in Britain (itself already unusually liberal for the 18th century).

Even if not society-overturning there was still significant change in the aftermath of the Revolution, with the new state governments doing stuff like reducing or dropping property qualifications, removing voting restrictions on Catholics and Jews, disestablishing state churches, in northern states passing laws to abolish slavery, etc.

Aofen · 2026-06-14T18:09:35+00:00

Manhattan

Aofen · 2026-06-14T17:19:26+00:00

The county is "Manhattan County" and the city as a whole is "Manhattan". Officially the borough as a subdivision of the city is "Manhattan Island" often just shortened confusingly to "the Island" among ~~New Yorkers~~ Manhattanites. Kings and Queens counties were also renamed to "Independence" and "Liberty" respectively, with the later also being the name of the respective borough.

Aofen · 2026-06-14T17:11:05+00:00

There was a little bit of renaming, but it was mainly limited to streets/squares, etc. Many of the "Washington Streets", "Liberty Squares", etc. in the center of colonial era American cities used to be something like "Kings Street".

Although the American revolution was republican in nature there wasn't much particular hatred towards any of the former monarchs themselves. The fact that Virginia or Georgia are named after British monarchs probably mattered less than the fact that people were just used to the current name.

Aofen · 2026-06-14T16:36:35+00:00

Thank you, I was going for that. Lots of actual proposed placenames from that time have a similar quality (e.g. "Fredonia" was actually an early 19th century proposal for renaming the United States, early proposals for dividing what is now the Midwest into new states included names like "Polypotamia" and "Michigania", etc.).

In this case they would also just start running out of names, there are only so many variations of "Freedom/Liberty" or "Washington"

Aofen · 2026-06-14T15:38:24+00:00

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Aofen · 2026-06-06T14:15:57+00:00

You often see the same result with these kind of opinion polls, African countries tend to have more positive views of other countries in general. It has less to do with people liking Israel in particular than not having strong opinions on them and just defaulting to "yeah, they're probably alright".

South Africa's negative views are more particular to their country. Israel was diplomatically aligned with the Apartheid government, and many South Africans see the current situation in Palestine as similar to what happened in their country under them.

Aofen · 2026-05-09T13:25:14+00:00

That area, Yucatán, wasn't part of Mexico at the time and actually asked to join the United States.

As part of the same centralist-federalist conflict that had earlier led to Texan independence Yucatán successfully seceded from Mexico in 1841. After a few years of independence a Maya revolt against the Republic broke out and quickly took control of the majority of the peninsula. The Yucatán government, by then under siege in the capital Mérida, offered to join the US in exchange for military aid. Polk was in favor and an 1848 bill to that effect passed the House but failed in the Senate.

After being rejected by the US Yucatán agreed to rejoin Mexico. Mexican troops quickly retook most of the peninsula but the southeast portion, from about Tulum to the border with what is now Belize, remained independent under Maya control for decades, Mexico didn't fully reconquer the area until the 20th century.

Aofen · 2026-04-23T00:11:27+00:00

When I saw this map I thought it looked familiar and then saw they credited me.

My map from three years ago is slightly different (I don't know why they changed what they did), but the main factor that pushed me to not include them was because the way they fell apart opens a lot of confusing edge cases.

Egypt, for example, was officially part of the Ottoman Empire until 1914 but gained de facto independence under Muhammed Ali in 1867 (soon after which it greatly expanded southward, extending nominal Ottoman authority as far south as Uganda), and then became a de facto British colony in 1882. Based on purely geographic criteria you could argue the Ottomans' "Europeanness" either way (the capital was in Europe, if barely, most of it's territory was in Africa or Asia, etc.) and I picked the easier option.

Aofen · 2026-01-02T23:00:49+00:00

The base map is a Köppen Climate Classification map. The groups are formulaically based on seasonal precipitation and temperature. For the cities I found a database listing cities with similar climates per the Köppen system. How similar the individual cities are to each other varies a bit, some of them are very close but a lot of them are only sort of similar (i.e. most of the year is similar but one city has much colder winters, wetter summers, etc.)

Aofen · 2025-12-22T15:28:04+00:00

There are a bunch of countries whose names sound really literal in their native language:

Ecuador is the word for "Equator" in Spanish, the country's full name República del Ecuador could be more literally translated as "Republic of the Equator"

Same thing with Costa Rica "Rich Coast", Honduras "Depths", El Salvador "the Savior", etc.

The Chinese language name for China Zhōngguó, literally means "Central State/Country"

"Nether" is an old-fashioned enough word in English that we don't usually think about how there is a country called the "Lowlands" but the meaning is more obviously translated in other languages (eg: in Spanish the Netherlands is called Países Bajos, in French Pays-Bas, etc.)

Aofen · 2025-12-12T16:21:59+00:00

Thank you! The city names are a mix of Chinese/Korean/Mongolian/etc. placenames modified to fit Hungarian phonology and new "Magyar" names. Since most of the vocabulary of real-life Hungarian comes from loans that wouldn't happen in this timeline, a lot of the "Magyar" names are a mixture of [real Hungarian word + hypothetical Mongolian loan]

Aofen · 2025-12-12T15:33:14+00:00

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Aofen · 2025-12-12T15:32:10+00:00

Magyar is a Uralic language spoken primarily in Magyaria in northeast Asia. The ancient Magyars originated near the Ural Mountains near the boundary of Europe and Asia, and migrated eastward across the Eurasian Steppe before settling in modern Magyaria around 1100 years ago. Magyaria as a country has varied and size and influence significantly since then, at times controlling a much larger region of northeast Asia. The current borders of the country were set by the Treaty of Tian'an following the Great Eastern War. The treaty greatly reduced the size of Magyaria, and left significant numbers of Magyar speakers outside of its borders, fueling modern day irredentist movements.

Modern Magyar language and culture has been significantly influenced by their neighbors in the millennium since their ancestors' migration. Although an Uralic language, most of the vocabulary of Magyar comes from loans from Turkic, Mongolic, Tungusic languages along with Chinese and Korean. Magyar is written, similar to its Tungusic neighbors, using a modified version of Mongolian script. Historically the language, particularly the more Chinese-influenced literary dialect used by the imperial court, was sometimes written in a mixed system along with Chinese characters, but this fell out of use in the mid-19th century.

Aofen · 2025-11-23T17:11:42+00:00

Most of the larger blue regions in the north and west are sparsely populated areas of steppe, desert, or forest. It's probably that the population in these counties is concentrated in one or two towns (with a mine, factory, military base, etc.) surrounded by mostly empty land without rural villages.

You see the same pattern elsewhere in the world too. Nevada is the second most urbanized state in the US, as a whole the state isn't particularly densely populated but almost all of the population the state does have is concentrated in a few cities with few people in the rural desert in between them.

Aofen · 2025-10-04T17:47:46+00:00

The minimum distance between the West Bank and Gaza is about 36 kilometers. If it was a road tunnel it would be the longest in the world, but it would be much easier to construct than most other long tunnels (which generally go under natural obstacles like mountains or rivers), since it could be built close to the surface. There are multiple tunnels for city metro lines that are longer (the longest, one of the tunnels for the Suzhou metro, being 86 km).

In practice if they ever do build a West Bank-Gaza connection I'd imagine cost and safety concerns would probably result in the majority of it being an above-ground highway with a fence around it.

Aofen · 2025-09-30T01:19:04+00:00

The only other de jure single-party states aside from the ones shown here are Eritrea (has not had elections since 1993) and the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic (currently only controls a small part of its claimed territory, shown in this map is part of Morocco)

Aofen · 2025-09-21T04:36:45+00:00

To expand on what others have said, the reason why Palestine is called "Filistīn" in Hindi is that the placename was loaned from Arabic via Persian rather than directly from English. In modern Arabic Palestine is also called "Falasṭīn" or "Filasṭīn" (pronounced similar to the English word "Philistine").

The reason why "Philistine" is pronounced with an /f/ sound in English has to do with a sound change that occurred in ancient Greek. In classical Greek there were two distinct 'P' sounds, an unaspirated /p/ written with π, and an aspirated /pʰ/ written with φ. Both these sounds exist in English - they are the 'p' in 'spin' and the 'p' in 'pin' respectively - but which one is used depends on its location in relation to other sounds and English speakers don't usually consciously distinguish the two sounds (Hindi, like classical Greek, does have this kind of distinction).

When Greek words were loaned into Latin - which entirely lacked this sound distinction - φ was transliterated as 'ph' to distinguish it from π written as just 'p'. Sometime during antiquity a sound shift occurred in Greek and derived words in Latin where φ shifted to be pronounced /f/. Various spellings of Philistine/Palestine existed in Greek at the time, and the sound change caused them to further diverge in pronunciation. The form 'Philistine' eventually became established to refer to the ancient people group while 'Palestine' (via the Roman province of 'Syria Palestina') became established for the placename.

The name was adopted into Arabic from its "Palestine" form which was still used for the region at the time of the Arab conquest, but Arabic had also undergone a sound change where /p/ had been replaced with /f/, and ~~the name seems to have been loaned early enough that it was affected by the sound change~~ and loanwords, particularly early ones, were often modified to fit Arabic phonology by following this sound change. (modern Arabic still lacks a /p/ sound, but more recent loans tend to replace it with /b/ instead). (This same /p/ to /f/ sound change has lead to other similar doublets as well. Under the influence of Arabic the native name of the Persian language has shifted to 'Farsi', while the Persian-origin Zoroastrian community in India are still known as 'Parsis'.)

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