This is nonsense. Asia was invented when "Europa" was, that is by the Greeks in during their struggles with the "Asiatic" Persians. This was before we thought in terms of continents being distinct land masses, which Europe and Asia certainly are not. In terms of culture and ethnicity it is certainly the case that the Himalayas and related mountain ranges constitute a much more significant boundary than the Ural Mountains and the Bosporus. Barkley Rosser On Fri, 05 Jun 1998 12:22:31 -0400 Wojtek Sokolowski <sokol at jhu.edu> wrote:
> At 11:29 AM 6/5/98 -0400, Doug Henwood wrote:
> >Speaking of Asia, who invented the idea of "Asia" anyway? Who thought that
> >that Indians and Japanese had enough in common to be classified under that
> >same label?
>
>
> I suspect 'the gummint' - they are notorious for using idiotic geographical
> labels that put apples and organges into one basket. For example, DoD
> classifies Hungarian as an "Eastern European Language" - the idiocy of that
> classification is that Eastern European languages are Slavonic EXCEPT the
> Hungarian which belongs (together with the Finnish) to an entirely
> different linguistic group.
>
> Another example, until late 60s early 70s they used a label "Warning
> propaganda" on everything published on the other side of the Iron Curtian,
> including translations of American literature (I 'liberated' the rubber
> stamp they used to that end as material evidence).
>
> Regards,
>
> Wojtek Sokolowski
>
-- Rosser Jr, John Barkley rosserjb at jmu.edu