The King Of Rhye wrote:thomasquinn 32989 wrote:
BETA215 wrote: América is a continent. South America, North America and Central America are parts of América.
Until 1881, you were unquestionably right. However, between 1881 and 1914, the Panama Canal was constructed, and since then, America has consisted of two separate continents, North America and South America.
But then what about referring to Europe and Asia as separate continents, as is done??? According to that reasoning, there'd be less justification to calling them seperate continents than there'd be for calling NA and SA as such.....and I guess Africa wasn't a separate continent until 1869 either!!
(I now see it is sometimes called "Afro-Eurasia", and some people say there are 4 continents.....I say phooey to all that, I was always taught there's 7, dangit! lol.....but then again, I was always taught there were 9 planets in the solar system!!!! :P)
You are correct, Europe is not technically a continent either - it is a SUBcontinent of the Eurasian continent. The continued teaching of Europe as a continent is little more than a psychological exercise to spare the bruised egos of the European imperialists of the late 19th century and 20th centuries.
And indeed, until 1869 Europe, Asia and Africa were also connected by land and thus did not form wholly independent continents. However, the term and the concept of "continent" only came into use in the 16th century, and that is when the Europeans *really* started exploring the world beyond our little subcontinent. It is derived from the latin "terra continens", meaning "continuous/uninterrupted land". The exact boundaries of the continents didn't become completely sure until the arrival of space-based photography of the earth, so the uncertainties geographers had to deal with in the past are, in my opinion, a fair justification of the confusion on the number of continents.
The division into seven continents is also fairly arbitrary. I take it you refer to the list of
- Africa, America, Antarctica, America, Australia, Europe, Oceania
Just a few questions one could ask about that list: why isn't Greenland a separate continent when Australia is? Granted, Australia is bigger, but surely, that is simply a gradual rather than an absolute difference (Greenland is about 30% of the size of Australia)? Or would Australia cease to be a continent when a certain amount of square kilometers of the land have eroded away? Also, why is Oceania one continent? And why isn't Indonesia a continent, or the Philippines? If Europe is a continent, why isn't Arabia?
It's a difficult matter, as sadly there are only conventions, not strict formal criteria, but there is an accepted definition, and I would propose to stick strictly to this accepted definition of continents, namely "large, continuous, discrete masses of land". That would present us with the following continents:
Eurasia, Africa (Suez Canal), North America, South America (Panama canal), Antarctica, Australia. The 'smaller' landmasses would then be regarded as islands of the major bodies, but that is admittedly still arbitrary. They would include Greenland (N. America), Indonesia/Philippines/Japan (Asia) and Madagascar (Africa).