Re: Afrasian?
From: | Andreas Johansson <and_yo@...> |
Date: | Friday, October 11, 2002, 7:58 |
Tim May wrote:
>
>Andreas Johansson writes:
> >
> > But I'm not having any megalomanic dreams of changing geographic
> > terminology. The question was rather intended to probe whether you
>thought
> > it could be a good name in a more perfect world. Thou evidently dost
>not.
> > (That said, someone must've coined Eurasia, and it probably sounded
>weird at
> > first, too.)
> >
>
>Eurasia's one of the three superstates in 1984 by George Orwell. Does
>anyone know if this is the origin of the term?
>
>I certainly think it would be useful to have a term for the landmass
>as a whole, but I'm not entirely satisfied with Eurasica. For one
>thing, Europe gets three unique letters*, and Africa only one.
>
>I wonder... is it possible to run the lojban gismu generation
>algorithm on the three words as if they were terms for the same thing
>in different languages? Of course, that would give us a 5 letter term
>conforming to lojban morphology, which wouldn't be recognizable, but
>it might be interesting.
>
>* Or 2, depending on how you look at it, but there's definitely a
> stronger suggestion of Europe than Africa.
I think of it as _Eur-as-ica_, with three letters from Africa.
Leaving Asia, which of course makes up most of the Old World, with the least
number of letters is hardly "fair", but I more tried to create something
sounding reasonably than something entirely "fair" or "rational".
Couple other possible combinations; _Afreurasia_, _Eurafrasia_.
Andreas
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