Continents

[flump1]

Can somebody please help me and my husband out as we can not remember all the continents !!! Ignorant I know, we think there are seven ,if anybody could name them we would be grateful, Thanks .

[Carakeel]

I think the continents are Africa, Antarctica, Asia, Australia, Europe, North America, and South America.

[Narolines]

This is a real can of worms -traditionally we were always taught that there were 5 continents, but in fact there are a number of ways of classifying continents and various geographers recognise anything from 5 to 8 at present. I suggest you look here: http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/continent

[bernardo]

Narolines - who is "we"? I was always taught that there are 7 - as named by Carakeel.

[Quizmonster]

Different people may well define continents in different ways and thus some consider Australasia and Oceania to be continents. However, there is just no way these places could fit the definition of what a continent is according to The Oxford English Dictionary (TOED), which is the 'bible' of English word-meanings.
It says: "One of the main continuous bodies of land on the earth's surface." (My bold print.) It's pretty clear that, if there is one thing that just cannot be said of some half-a-million separate islands, it's that they fit the description 'continuous'! (The word's source is the Latin for holding together/contiguous.)
The dictionary goes on to list the continents as: Asia, Africa, Europe, North America, South America, Australia and Antarctica as Carakeel says. All-in-all, I'd say TOED is a much more authoritative source than Wikipedia.

[JustSia]

Quizmonster, this is one thing that has always bothered me. Given the definition you gave how on Earth do they justify separating Eurasia? I can understand the Americas, after all they are more or less separated, but Europe and Asia are on one continent. Anyhow, I gave up on this a long time ago. It's amazing that in this day and age scientists can't agree on such simple things as 'how many continents there are', although my suspicion is that it's more to do with politics.

Oh, and yes, I was brought up to believe there were 6 continents.

[homerthegrea]

i was taught there were 5 Africa, Aisa, Europe, Australaisa and The Americas

[Grunty]

For what it's worth, in the 1950s at school I was taught that there were five continents, which were represented by rings on the Olympic symbol. They were Europe, Asia, Africa, North America and South America. Illogical I know, but that was what we were taught.

[jno]

I was brought up on seven, like Carakeel, but it does raise problems. Why shouldn't islands be included? If Sicily is part of Europe, why shouldn't Papua be part of Oceania? And as JustSia says, how does the OED definition explain away the split into Europe and Asia? And isn't Africa linked to Asia the same way as North and South America are linked (by a narrow land bridge now with a canal cut through)?

I must say, Quizmonster, despite my respect for the OED, I find its definition problematic, and Wikipedia's compilation of lists much more helpful - if it doesn't produce a definitive answer, it's clearly because there isn't one.

[Loosehead]

I always went with 6 at school, Antarctica, Africa, Europe, Asia, Americas, Australasia.

Oceania seems to be a fairly new trendy term for Australasia , a bit like Tsumani. I mean before a couple of years ago they where called "tidal Waves" I know pedants they are not tidal, it's just that that was the general term that was used.

[natalie_1982]

At school (late 80's) I was taught there were 7:
Asia
Australasia / Oceania
North America
South America
Eurpoe
Africa
Antarctica

[jake-the-peg]

Yes and it tidal wave was wrong - it's not just pedantry - after all the seven bore is a tidal wave.

You shouldn't just stick to doing something if it's wrong because it's always been that way.

Anyway this whole continents thing sounds rather like the debate on how many planets there are.

You could make a fair case of defining a continent based on plate tectonics like this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Plates_tect 2_en.svg
but you'd have to put up with some continents that are totally submerged and some that have boundries on land.

I'm not sure that the concept of a continent is particularly useful anyway - perhaps we should just scrub the whole idea of them

[jno]

Loosehead, I think Oceania is much wider - it is used (sometimes, at least) to include all the islands of the Pacific, whereas Australasia just means Australia and islands about as far as New Zealand but not Polynesia or Micronesia. (It means literally 'south Asia'.) As for tsunamis, well, you've spotted the reason for the change of name yourself: the old one was wrong.

[Quizmonster]

On that basis, J, as you say, before the Suez Canal was dug, the whole of Europe, Asia and Africa was just one big continent! Indeed, don't geographers claim that there was at one time only one lump of land in the world anyway? But that was some time before words such as 'continent' - with their etymological significance - came into being!
Islands that are fairly 'substantial', either individually or as a tight group, in their particular settings are clearly part of the given whole...eg the British Isles...are 'part(s)' of Europe. However, the multitude of small islands scattered across the vastnesses of the Pacific Ocean can not really be so included.
That's in my opinion - and that of TOED, that is - and personally I'm sticking with it, since I cannot get away from what the word actually means.

[Quizmonster]

I have to point out, perhaps, that the four answers above mine were not there when I started to write my response!

[jno]

British Isles part of Europe? I'm sorry, Quizmonster, but you are hereby expelled from the Conservative Party.

But JustSia's question still stands: Europe and Asia are pretty darn continuous, contiguous and continental; I think splitting them is a matter of history rather than geography.

[jno]

Pangaea (perhaps):

http://www.astro.uwo.ca/~jlandstr/planets/webf igs/earth/images/pangaea.gif

[netibiza]

In the 1950's we were taught that there were 5 continents, 4 beginning with A - Asia. Australia, Africa and America and One begining with E - Europe - thus shall I stick to that knowledge.

[janetsflower]

I was at school in the 70s and we were taught 5 too.

[Narolines]

"We", bernardo, are those of us old enough to have gone to school before successive governments thought it would be a good idea to interfere with every aspect of education, disregard the opinions of professional educationists and hamstring the teaching profession to the point where most of the good teachers left and the education system is now in a worse state than in a good many third-world countries. Do I sound like a Grumpy Old Man? I note, though, that I am not alone among posters to this question in having been taught that there were 5 continents - at least one having gone to school 20 years later than I.

[Quizmonster]

Me!? Expelled from the Conservative Party, J!? If only you knew how funnny that is...

I've just consulted the Bloomsbury Dictionary, Chambers, TOED, the Encyclop�dia Britannica, Hutchinson's Encyclopedia and Collier's Encyclopedia (USA)...all to hand...and not one of them credits either Oceania or Australasia with being a continent. They all employ vague words/phrases such as...(quote) "regions, lands, divisions, groups, collective name, colloquially known as, vaguely defined"...and so forth.

Re Australasia - a name invented by the French in the 1750s - TOED says it is: "used to include Australia and its adjoining islands". Re Oceania - a name invented by the French in the 1840s - the OED says: it is "a general name for the islands of the Pacific and its adjacent seas". In neither case, does the word �continent' appear in the definition. Nor did either of the Frenchmen concerned believe he was naming a continent. (One thing you can say for sure about 18th century scientists is that they knew their Latin!)

In answer to JustSia's query on Europe and Asia...my apologies for overlooking it earlier... these were named by the ancient Greeks, so of course history comes into the matter as well as geography. Bear in mind that the ancient Greeks' knowledge of geography was necessarily somewhat circumscribed!

Incidentally, I didn't claim that all contiguous lumps of the earth were continents...what I did claim was that - in order to be a continent - any given lump of earth had to be contiguous. Not at all the same thing...and certainly inapplicable to a myriad of islands.

As far as I am concerned, one can call Australasia and Oceania �geographical regions', call them �archipelagoes', call them whatever one likes...but one really cannot call them �continents'.


And there, I for one shall leave things. Cheers to all.