Madagascar
Etymology

In the Malagasy language, the island of Madagascar is called Madagasikara (Malagasy pronunciation:) and its people are referred to as Malagasy. The origin of the name is uncertain, and is likely foreign, having been propagated in the Middle Ages by Europeans. If this is the case, it is unknown when the name was adopted by the inhabitants of the island. No single Malagasy-language name predating Madagasikara appears to have been used by the local population to refer to the island, although some communities had their name for part or all of the lands they inhabited.

One hypothesis relates Madagascar to the word Malay, referring to the Austronesian origin of the Malagasy people in modern-day Indonesia. In a map by Muhammad al-Idrisi dating from the year 1154, the island is named Gesira Malai, or "Malay island" in Arabic. The inversion of this name to Malai Gesira, as it was known by the Greeks, is thought to be the precursor of the modern name of the island. The name "Malay island" was later rendered in Latin as Malichu, an abbreviated form of Malai Insula, in the medieval Hereford Mappa Mundi as the name of Madagascar.

Another hypothesis is that Madagascar is a corrupted transliteration of Mogadishu, the capital of Somalia and an important medieval Indian Ocean port. This would have resulted from 13th-century Venetian explorer Marco Polo confusing the two locations in his memoirs, in which he mentions the land of Madageiscar to the south of Socotra. This name would then have been popularized on Renaissance maps by Europeans. One of the first documents written that might explain why Marco Polo called it Madagascar is in a 1609 book on Madagascar by Jerome Megiser. Jerome Megiser describes an event in which the kings of Mogadishu and Adal traveled to Madagascar with a fleet of around twenty-five thousand men in order to invade the wealthy islands of Taprobane and Sumatra. However, a tempest threw them off course and they landed on the coasts of Madagascar, conquering the island and signing a treaty with its inhabitants. They remained for eight months and erected at different points of the island eight pillars on which they engraved "Magadoxo", a name which later, by corruption became Madagascar. Jan Huyghen van Linschoten, a Dutch traveler who copied Portuguese works and maps, confirmed this event by saying "Madagascar has its name from 'makdishu' (Mogadishu)" whose "shayk" invaded it.

The name Malagasikara, or Malagascar, is also historically attested. A British state paper in 1699 records the arrival of eighty to ninety passengers from "Malagaskar" to what would eventually become New York City. An 1882 edition of the British newspaper The Graphic referred to "Malagascar" as the name of the island, stating that it is etymologically a word of Malay origin, and may be related to the name of Malacca. In 1891, Saleh bin Osman, a Zanzibari traveler, refers to the island as "Malagaskar" when recounting his journeys, including as part of the Emin Pasha Relief Expedition. In 1905, Charles Basset wrote in his doctoral thesis that Malagasikara was the way the island is referred to by its natives, who emphasized that they were Malagasy, and not Madagasy.
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