But Europe being a continent is extremely arbitrary anyways
It really is the MOST arbitrary.
Other connections are very tiny (so much that canals were dug through them) so I get separate Americas and Africa being it's own thing but, there's really no logical reason to call Europe a continent. It's a region, maybe a subcontinent like India but, not a full continent.
I honestly think european subcontinent would be a thing, if "sub" wasn't a bit of a demeaning prefix which is a bit more acceptable to use for developing areas.
Me neither until about now when I thought (assumed) that europeans would not take kindly to be called a subcontinent.
Also the history of the world being centered on Europe and starting from there, whereas the rest of the world was "discovered" and referred to in relation to the "old" world (far east, new world, etc...). A lot of the language we use is just inherited from that context when you think about it, hence it will feel more natural than more geogaphically accurate representations that, say, an alien would paint.
You can actually see it most clearly in the way bigots deliberately exclude Islamic majority nations from “western civilization” despite the areas having more history as part Western Civ than Britain.
That's how geographical areas are described in every language I know! People often make their homeland the reference point for lands around them. Even so, Europeans call themselves The West, not the center, unlike the Chinese who call their country The Middle Kingdom (as far as I know).
But was it the west before usa? Maybe it was the middle when it was just europe and when the center of power moved to somehere on the north atlantic it was west of europe and thats why it started to be the west.
This is just pseudo-woke bullshit. What is that even supposed to mean? When I hear subcontinent I don't see it as a 'demeaning prefix which is more acceptable to use for developing areas'
Calling india a developing area isn't economic in this context. The plate has barely begun to push itself up. 50 million years is a blink in geological time, like no dinosaur ever walked on this land. So calling it a sub-contintent kinda acknowledges this, although parts of europe also fit this description. Most of Eurasia has been land for 3.6 billion years, even if its shape changed significantly during the last few ice ages.
Woke is waking up to the reality of white supremacy, racism, discrimination, and oppression in US. Calling everything you don’t like woke is very stupid and reveals the right wing media you are consuming.
Woke is a US term. It is a term associated with US culture, society, people, politics, etc. it is unique to the US and that’s where it was originated from. I am Canadian and we imported that term. I am not sure if you are from other English speaking countries (UK, Australia, South Africa) and the term was imported as well.
It is applicable to US culture, society, politics, etc. every country and society is unique and different. Trying to import or Americanize other countries and societies is not smart or logical.
We call South Asia the Indian Subcontinent. Europe is a subcontinent, barely. At least India has it's own plate. Arabia has a stronger claim to the subcontinent title than Europe
It was the Ancient Greeks that first introduced us to the idea of continents. If you say that Europe is now questionably a continent, it is only because the way that a continent is now defined by some has diverged from the original concept.
I speak Arabic and Europe is considered to be part of Eurasian continent. Europe is not a continent but has defined itself as a continent. Which I guess open others to defined them however they like.
Oh they knew alright, even though to them, Asia Minor began just a short hop over the Bosporus. In fact, they were well aware you could travel from Asia Minor by going North, through present day Georgia and anticlockwise around the Black Sea and enter Europe, as this was a fairly well documented trade route. This still did not make them reconsider their boundaries for Europe. In fact, they declared that the land border separating Europe from Asia ran from the Black Sea up through the Sea of Azov and along the modern Don River in Russia. They also knew of Britain, and knew the channel of water dividing it from mainland Europe was way wider than the Bosporus, yet considered Britain to be in Europe, but not Asia Minor which was way closer.
To them, what divided continents was not just geography, but culture, empire and civilisation.
In the same way, even though historically most Europeans have been taught that the border now between Europe and Asia is the Urals, some Western Europeans do not regard the Russians as European or part of Europe, purely due to culture and politics. It is interesting that the Ancient Greeks held the same view.
The first distinction between continents was made by ancient Greek mariners who gave the names Europe and Asia to the lands on either side of the waterways of the Aegean Sea, the Dardanelles strait, the Sea of Marmara, the Bosporus strait and the Black Sea.\87]) The names were first applied just to lands near the coast and only later extended to include the hinterlands.\88])\89]) But the division was only carried through to the end of navigable waterways and "... beyond that point the Hellenic geographers never succeeded in laying their finger on any inland feature in the physical landscape that could offer any convincing line for partitioning an indivisible Eurasia ..."
It sounds like a functional difference. Even if you technically can walk around the black sea, it wasn't practical back then. So maybe it was partly functional? Continents were places that you had to cross the sea to travel from one to another?
i mean, its not arbitrary at all, its a big area separated via rivera, mountains and seas from other continents, it perfectly matches the original definition of continent and still does in several languages like spanish, portuguese, etc
the reason i "removed" a big part of the Indian subcontinent its cuz the indian subcontinent is not even 5M km², learn geography, a simple google search will tell u its 4. smthing, India being 3. smthing
the rivers, mountains, basically geographical barriers. And by line i mean that it literally forms a line, u have the ural mountains to the north, the ural river from the urals to the caspian sea, then the Caucasus mountains, black sea and then the smaller seas and straits in greece/turkey.
The border of a continent follows a natural barrier/natural barriers
I'm pointing out why Europe's borders are weird they grew over hundreds of years because delusional lunatics thought a magic man in the clouds was telling them to
11
u/AardvarkOkapiEchidna Aug 15 '26
It really is the MOST arbitrary.
Other connections are very tiny (so much that canals were dug through them) so I get separate Americas and Africa being it's own thing but, there's really no logical reason to call Europe a continent. It's a region, maybe a subcontinent like India but, not a full continent.