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Not in English. I know in the Spanish speaking world there's a single American continent, but as far as I know across the English speaking world it's taught as
by losvedir 1y ago
Not in English. I know in the Spanish speaking world there's a single American continent, but as far as I know across the English speaking world it's taught as two continents, North and South America. We have the term "the Americas" to refer to both.
- neves 1y agoGeographically speaking, America was a single continent till the Panama channel was built
- Jedd 1y agoAccurately speaking, that wasn't true before the Panama canal was built, and remains not true subsequently.
- AdhemarVandamme 1y agoHow would you argue such claims, geographically and/or accurately speaking? — Other than: that’s how I was taught it is; or that’s how my favourite teacher/book/source-with-some-authority says it is. There is no generally-agreed-upondefinition for “continent”, in the same way that there was no generally-agreed-upon definition of “planet” prior to the IAU 2006 General Assembly. Continents are identified by convention (and there are a few competing conventions) rather than any strict criteria. I was taught (in Europe) that there are 6 continents, 1 of which close-to-uninhabited: Europe, Asia, Africa, Oceania, America, Antarctica. This convention is the same as the one for the UNSD “continental regions”. The five interlocking rings of the Olympic flag represent these five inhabited continents. There’s another convention that considers Eurasia to be a single continent. And another that even considers Afro-Eurasia to be a single continent.
- Jedd 1y ago> And another that even considers Afro-Eurasia to be a single continent. Well, as per parent's logic, that claim is out the door ever since the Suez was dug out.
- neves 1y agoYes. A continent is a big contiguous mass of land. There were 3: Eurasia-africa, America, Oceania and Antarctica. Suez and Panama channels created other continents.
- Jedd 1y agoAs an Australian, inculcated with the orthodoxy that this was the largest island while also being the smallest continent - how does 'Oceania' fit with your quite technical 'big contiguous mass of land'? If we made another small rut parallel to either Suez or Panama, would we add 1 to the count of continents?
- lynx97 1y agoWell, in Ecuador and Peru, where I used to travel for 2 months, a lot of people were making a point of saying "América del Sur" to differentiate their place from the USA.
- skissane 1y agoI really think this is a failure of education, teaching kids that there are N continents as if that were some kind of objective truth, as opposed to the reality that the definition of “continent” is at least partially conventional, so there are several different values of N which are arguably correct - anything from 4 to 7 is mainstream (at a global level) Wikipedia is helping, though. It says (I didn’t know this) that the “single American continent” model was mainstream in the US prior to WW2, so even if there is now a single definition in the Anglosphere, that’s a relatively recent development. I remember as a kid believing that the Americas contained three continents-North, Central and South. I’m sure I’m not the only person to have ever thought that, and given how conventional these definitions are, can it really be said to be wrong?