New York City the city is home to the world's two largest stock exchanges by total market capitalization, the New York Stock Exchange and NASDAQ. In 1664, the city was named in honor of the Duke of York, who would become King James II of England. James's older brother, King Charles II, had appointed the Duke proprietor of the former territory of New Netherland, including the city of New Amsterdam, which England had recently seized from the Dutch. During the Wisconsinan glaciation, 75,000 to 11,000 years ago, the New York City region was situated at the edge of a large ice sheet over
New York City English vowels sounds)—New York City's split not identical though to Philadelphia's. Linguist William Labov has pointed out that a similarly-structured (though differently pronounced) split is found today in both the standard and London-area accents of England, indicating the likely origin of the New York split. New York City became an urban economic power in the eighteenth century, with the city's financial elites maintaining close ties with the British Empire even after the Revolutionary War. According to Labov, New York speakers' loss of the "r" sound after vowels (incidentally, not found in the nearby Delaware Valley) is thus an imitation of the