-ana

-ana (more frequently -iana) is a suffix of Latin origin, used in English to convert nouns, usually proper names, into mass nouns, as in Shakespeareana or Dickensiana, items or stories related to William Shakespeare or Charles Dickens, respectively.

The recognition of this usage as a self-conscious literary construction, typically as a book title, traces back at least to 1740, when it was mentioned in an edition of Scaligerana, a collection of table talk of Joseph Justus Scaliger, from around 150 years previously. By that period Scaliger was described as "the father, so to speak, of all those books published under the title of -ana".

As grammatical construction it is the neuter plural, nominative form of an adjective: so from Scaliger is formed first the adjective Scaligeranus (Scaligeran) which is then put into the form of an abstract noun Scaligerana (Scaligeran things). In Americana, a variant construction, the adjectival form already exists as Americanus, so it is simply a neuter plural (suffix –a on the stem American-); the case of Victoriana, things associated with the Victorian period, is superficially similar, but the Latin adjective form is Dog Latin.

Ana

Ana or ANA may refer to:

Places

Entertainment

Organisations and companies

Mother (video game)

Mother (Japanese: マザー, MOTHER), released outside Japan as EarthBound Beginnings, is a 1989 Japanese role-playing video game developed by Ape and published by Nintendo for the Famicom (Nintendo Entertainment System). The game is modeled on the gameplay of the Dragon Quest series, but is set in the late 20th century United States, unlike its fantasy genre contemporaries. Mother follows the young Ninten as he uses his great-grandfather's studies on psychic powers to fight hostile, formerly inanimate objects and other enemies. The game uses random encounters to enter a menu-based, first-person perspective battle system. It is the first game in the Mother series and was followed by two sequels, EarthBound in 1994 and Mother 3 in 2006.

The game's writer and director, Shigesato Itoi, pitched the game concept to Shigeru Miyamoto while visiting Nintendo's headquarters for other business. Though Miyamoto denied the proposal at first, he eventually gave Itoi a development team. The game was released in Japan on July 27, 1989. A North American version was localized into English, but was abandoned as commercially nonviable. A copy of this prototype was later found and circulated on the Internet under the unofficial, fan-created title EarthBound Zero. The game was eventually localized and released worldwide under the name EarthBound Beginnings for the Wii U Virtual Console on June 14, 2015.