Re: OT: Renaming the continents

Padraic Brown writes:
 > --- Tim May <butsuri@...> wrote:
 >
 > > I'm not certain I'll actually use such a scheme
 > > for LC-01 -
 > > pragmatically it may be better to stick with
 > > the old names*.  But it's
 > > an interesting exercise.  All the continents
 > > seem to have essentially
 > > been named by Europeans, which in itself seems
 > > rather unfair.
 >
 > Well, they came up with the idea of "continent",
 > so they get to name them! No worries there.
 >
 > The antieuropeanism is a bit offputting.
 >


Well, I'm not trying to be antiEuropean.  I think plenty of Europeans
would consider "America", at least, to be ill chosen, if in full
posession of the facts.  And I think the idea of naming landmasses is
fairly culturally independent - any human civilization with sufficient
knowledge to be aware of the distribution of land on the globe is
probably going to want to refer to them by name, although the relative
importance of regions on different scales is likely to vary.

I don't have any particular alternate history in mind myself - I'm
just thinking of what names we might choose now, if we were to be
faced withe the task of naming only after the globe had been
thouroughly mapped and explored.  And, well, I don't see any reason to
be Eurocentric in this. But don't get the idea that I support
knee-jerk antieuropeanism - I try to keep in mind the following quote:


        "For a Westerner to trash Western culture is like criticizing
        our nitrogen/oxygen atmosphere on the grounds that it
        sometimes gets windy, and besides, Jupiter's is much
        prettier. You may not realize its advantages until you're
        trying to breathe liquid methane."
               --Neal Stephenson

Reply