continents

[Dennis R. Preston]

>Lynne,

Doesn't this also apply to differences in "Middle," "Near," and "Far"
East for the two putatively related languages (British and American)?
I forgot how this goes?

dInIs

>--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

--
Dennis R. Preston
Department of Linguistics and Languages
Michigan State University
East Lansing MI 48824-1027 USA
preston at pilot.msu.edu
Office: (517)353-0740
Fax: (517)432-2736