Dawnland

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. The traditional homeland of the Wabanaki peoples in the northeastern part of North America, often used as a name for the region of Maine and nearby areas
2. A name for the northeastern region of North America that the Wabanaki peoples have long regarded as their ancestral territory
3. The ancestral lands of the Wabanaki nations in what is now northern New England, a region referred to by this evocative eastern name

Etymology: "Dawnland" is a compound of "dawn" and "land," and its most striking feature is that it was coined on purpose as a translation. The name refers to the Wabanaki Confederacy's ancestral homeland, in New England. It is a calque, meaning the English words were chosen to mirror the meaning of the Abenaki name "Wôbanaki," which is usually rendered as "people of the dawn" or "dawn-land people," since the region lies to the east, where the sun rises. The same method gave English a second, unrelated sense. Some English speakers, notably in the online Anglish community, have used "dawnland" as a calque of the Japanese 日本 (Nihon, "sun origin"), the name meaning Japan, which also means the land where the sun rises. Here the English word was built from Japanese meaning rather than borrowed as a sound.