Kinda weird to pretend it’s an American thing when it was happening long before the US even existed.

Here’s a partial list of locations in the UK. As you can see, not exactly a modern development

And it’s not just “New.” Novo, Nova, Nueva, Neu, etc. For example, Porto-Novo, the capital of Benin, was named by the Portuguese in the 1700s.

I got curious when N words (lol not like that) were all I could think of and did some digging. Shin, Xin, Jadid, and a bunch more. Naming a city after an existing city is an ancient tradition