continents

[Lynne Murphy]

--On Friday, February 22, 2002 10:35 am -0500 David Bergdahl
<bergdahl at OAK.CATS.OHIOU.EDU> wrote:

> Larry's point abt. Iceland is well taken: culture overrides geography for
> most of us.  Ask people if Israel is in Asia and they hedge--less so than
> Arabia or Yemen (although some people will say "Africa")--the hedge
> usually takes the form of creating the Middle East as a continent!
> India's "sub-continent status" is another example.  We don't want
> geographical (i.e. primarily geological) data to interfere with our
> notions of cultural affinity._______________________________________

An interesting dialectal variation in continentally-derived ethnonyms is
the difference between "Asian" (referring to people and sometimes to
cultural things, like cuisine) in the US and Britain (and South Africa).
In the US, if we say someone's "Asian" we usu. mean 'East Asian' (Chinese,
Japanese, Korean).  For people from India & Pakistan, we'd say "South
Asian" or just "Indian/Pakistani/etc."  In the UK and South Africa, if one
says that someone's "Asian" they mean 'South Asian'.  If they mean "East
Asian" they're more likely to use a specific country name (in SA, it's
often generic use of "Chinese") or "Oriental" or some such.

Lynne




Dr M Lynne Murphy
Lecturer in Linguistics
Acting Director, MA in Applied Linguistics
School of Cognitive and Computing Sciences
University of Sussex
Brighton BN1 9QH
UK

phone +44-(0)1273-678844
fax   +44-(0)1273-671320