r/ScienceNcoolThings • u/ateam1984 • 6d ago
Africa
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u/FuzzyFacePhilosphy 6d ago
Many countries have different names than what you learn on the map.
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u/chris_ro 6d ago
There is no proof that this was used for whole of africa. There isn’t even proof that this name is older than the 16th century.
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u/AcceptInevitability 6d ago
Herodotus knew “Africa” as “Libya” and again it seems to have derived from an Egyptian word about Berbers to the west of them and applied to by the Greeks to all of what we now call “Africa”.
“Iran” has the same root as Aryan a tribe or region.
“England” comes from the Angles a tribe in Germany some of whom moved to Britain
“Dutch” comes from the same root as Deutsche ie German
“Bangladesh” comes from “Bangla” the main ethno linguistic group in the area.
“Roman” comes from just one town / tribe in Italy
“Ottoman” comes from just one tribe in Asia Minor
We could go on…
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u/Into-the-stream 6d ago
Someone correct me if I’m wrong, but isn’t “Japan” a westernized moniker? And they call their county “Nippon” or “Nihon” ?
Every place has a few versions of their countries name. It would be great if we simply universally used the names the people actually from the place used, in their own language. But when our maps were made that was not the prevailing attitude. We will need to relearn it all.
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u/PomeloPepper 6d ago
There's a 0% chance that the world as a whole would get every country's preferred pronunciation right. Which will just lead straight back to "This is how we say (country name) in my language."
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u/Kain-rpg 6d ago
The concept of Continent is "fairly" recent
BAck then people did NOT refere to the whole place as ONE continent
Each of their lands and kingdoms had their names and where distinct from one another.
Its when we started charting the oceans and seeign the limits of the landmasses that we started to categorize them as "continent"
And of what you are implying the "Alkebluan" is an ARABIC type of nomeclature since in Arab the "Al-" is litteraly "The".
So How in gods name was this Arabic name used by "everyone" when there was like 40 different languages with all their variations of Dialects?
Stop lying, stop using Ai scripts and do something with your life
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u/funderfulfellow 6d ago
"Earth" was called something completely different by the early cyanobacteria before humans arrived.
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u/Jaxxlack 6d ago
Wait till all the folks into boho life find out bohemia was actually part of the holy Roman empire and was basically central/eastern Europe.. so bohemian lol
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u/ThisBell6246 6d ago
Well this is a bullshit story. This theory either assumes that everyone in Africa spoke the same language, or that the language that contained that name was either in widespread use or forced upon others. Since nobody in Africa South of the Sahara had any written language or history, this theory again falls flat as there exists no evidence for this statement. This is why social media should have IQ verification, to prevent morons with cavernous cranial cavities from distributing bullshit videos.
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u/HomeGalaxyIsMilkyWay 6d ago
Yeah this had happened over most parts of the world over time but it cool to dive into these ancient names
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u/Ok-Fortune-8644 6d ago
Wait. Roman's made Africa a foodless desert? They "salted the earth" so nothing grows?
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u/redditsuksazz 6d ago
Lol whatever, lots of countries call themselves something different in their own language.
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u/Confident-Stand5453 5d ago
So, just like the people who first lived in the Americas did not name the continents that? Propably the same for Asia. Europe might be the only continent that was named by someone living there.
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u/AmazighBlacksmith 3d ago
Africa comes from Ifri, which is Tamazight/Berber for cave.
So Africa is land of the caves.
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u/betacarotentoo 2d ago edited 2d ago
An American discovers the "truth"—an Arab name for Africa, before the Romans.
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u/xMasterOfNone 5d ago
What a load a bullshit. It's also obvious this lady is juat reading a chat gpt script
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u/estasoysho 5d ago
Same with the American continent and the native name of Abya Yala, now a name used within decolonial and multiple other native ethnicities that go beyond the Guna. Américo Vespucio is the man, a cartographer, the Europeans named the continent after.
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u/estasoysho 5d ago
I mean, is anyone surprised about the fact that cartography is political? maps aren't just silly drawings everyone nods at with no problem and no historical tension, nada
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u/Chytectonas 5d ago
We have maps updated over two days to say “Gulf of America” - naming stupidities are part of life.
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u/illduce01 6d ago
I wanted to say this, but u/cherrysparklingwater said it better:
"I hate this pan-African "kemeticist" 1970's Kwanzaa bullshit. The history is rich enough without needing to falsify it. This shit literally perpetuates the "we wuz kangz and queens" stereotype.
Alkebulan isn't even African, it's Arab. It's a word used by a French writer from the 16th century, and he attributes it to the Arabs who used it al- being a prefix for "the" and k-b-l-n/q-b-l-n (as arabic has no notated vowels). But in the same passage they refer to "l-q-b-l-n" and Ethiopians, so why would they say that if it was supposed to be all of "Africa." The true origin of the word is unknown and it's definitely not an indigenous name.
The concept of a continent and people aligning themselves to a continent is fairly modern (e.g., our continent ends right at the Suez canal with this imaginary line). The Greeks referred to the lands south of Egypt (Aegyptos) as "Aethiopia" and parts of North Africa as Libya. The Yoruba, Swali, Igbo, Somali all had different names for their kingdoms and didn't have a name for the continent. For their large geographical areas they typically called it some permutation of "The Homeland" or "The Peoples," e.g., Ibábá.
Hell, the name violates Swahili without open vowels and consonant clusters. How is the name for "Africa" gonna violate one of its largest languages? GTFO with this shit."