Re: OT: Renaming the continents

----- Original Message -----
From: "Tim May" <butsuri@...>
To: <CONLANG@...>
Sent: Sunday, December 15, 2002 4:55 PM
Subject: Renaming the continents


[snip]

> So what would make good names for places?  Ideally indigenous names
> would be a good start (except for Antarctica, for obvious reasons).
> But did anyone in the Americas or Australia have enough of a grasp of
> the large-scale to name them?  And I doubt anyone had a word
> for "Eurasia + Africa" before 1492 that wasn't synonymous with
> "Earth".
           It depends. Are you going for "fair and reasonable" or are you
going for "realistic"? Because realistically, I don't think the continents
would be named by gathering together the represenatives of each and
concluding that names should be organized according to the size,
orientation, and native description. The naming would probably have more to
do with the history of cartography, trade networks, population movements,
and power struggles in the alternate-history and less to do with how someone
would describe the planet from orbit.

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