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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 _________________________________________________________________ MSN Photos is the easiest way to share and print your photos: http://photos.msn.com/support/worldwide.aspx

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Wesley Parish <wes.parish@...>