You have to look at it differently..
First, they'd have been proud of where they came from.. but..
Imagine going away from home. To a 'new' country, never to come back again.
Everything there is different, the surroundings, the climate, the challenges. It's very easy to understand that people would get very homesick perhaps, or depressed even. Such vast new lands, so many things left behind.
So, they named the things around them with familiar names. They stuck to old habits, traditional dress, they kept singing the old songs, reading the old poems, to identify with home, which they missed.
They just wanted to feel at home, that's all there is to it, I think.. that.. and pride of their old country..
