Re: OT: Renaming the continents

Padraic Brown writes:
 > --- Tim May <butsuri@...> wrote:
 > > or some kind of neutral description.
 >
 > "New World"?
Possible, but suboptimum.  It's necessarily Old-world-centric, which
is not necessarily a problem.  More importantly, New World sound like
it should include Australia and Antarctica, which the Old World
encountered only after

 >
 > "CONTINENTAL LANDMASS #4A"
 >
 > Totally divorced from politics. With a numbering
 > system based on human migratory patterns; letters
 > indicate primary/secondary plate types.
 > Therefore, India is "#2D" because it's part of
 > "#2A", Asia, but is techtonically independent.
 >
It's reasonable, and worthy of consideration, but my initial feeling
is that it's not as much fun.  Also, numbers can seem to imply rank,
although I suppose you could either generate them randomly or sort by
some objectively measurable quality like land area... But numeric
tags seem unsatisfying, somehow.  I just can't imagine them being
adopted into general usage.  Of course, I'm not expecting anything I
come up with to be used, but if I can't even imagine people using it,
then that counts against it, caeteris paribus.  I suspect that such a
system lacks redundancy, too, in the same way as a 17th century
philosophical language.

 > > As for the rest, the only serious problem is
 > > Eurasia.  Europe just
 > > isn't a continent in the same way that the
 > > others are,
 >
 > But how are the others "continents"? Are you
 > basing this solely on geology, politics,
 > cartography, history or what?
 >

I'd say that the basic definition of "continent" in contemporary
English, is "A landmass which is big enough* and is completely
surrounded by water or is joined to another continent by a narrow
enough* isthmus (unless it's Europe or Asia)."

*  How big a landmass has to be to qualify, and how narrow an isthmus
   must be for the land at either end to be considered seperate
   continents, is not a question which can be precisely answered.
   It's something like "how many grains of sand make a heap?".

This is the sense in which I'm using "continent" (without the Eurasian
exception).

Tectonic plates need names too, of course, but that's more technical
nomenclature.  I imagine it's more useful for the average person to be
able to refer to "North America" than to the American Plate.

Subdivisions could reasonably be made on various factors of both
physical and cultural geography - I'd expect the divisions made to
vary according to context.

 >
 > > *  Which natives to take it from, of course, is
 > > a difficult problem in
 > >    itself.  But first I want to find out if
 > > _any_ natives had an
 > >    applicable term, before I start deciding
 > > which to use, if any.
 >
 > You mean a term for "continental landmass" as
 > opposed to "Earth" or "land"? Or a nebulous term
 > that could mean "land within a short radius all
 > the way up to every land on Earth"?
 >
 > A tall order indeed!
 >

I'm not sure what you mean by this.  What I'm looking for is a name
for their own landmass, or something which could be reasonably
extended to take that meaning.

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