Indian name for Australia?
- Thread starter Elidor
- Start date
Well, the new TL is now proof-read and I'm now typing up the corrections. Once they're done it's a matter of turning it into HTML and uploading it all. I hope to have it done before Xmas, but I'm starting to think that might be a bit optimistic, alas...
Keenir
Banned
BTW, is there anybody here who knows that the name we're now using to call this continent is actually derived from the Ambonese ?
I thought it was from Greek.
ninebucks
Banned
I don't think Classical Indians thought of geography in terms of compass points... (did they have compasses?)
The Indian perception of geography was that the known world encircled a massive ocean, and was itself encircled by huge mountain ranges, (the Himilayas, the Kush, etc.), and then beneath that, it was turtles all the way down, but that's another story.
In any case, the perception I have of Indian geographology, (which may be wrong), is that the directions weren't thought of being linear and grid-like, as in the West, but rather they were divided between oceanward and mountainward, and *clockwise and *anti-clockwise. So Australia, rather than being the Southern Continent, would be the *Clockwise Continent.
Flocculencio
Donor
Ahem- I'll point you to the example of the SE Asian Indianised Kingdom Ayyuthaya which was named after Ayodhya back in India. The only reason there are more examples of this with European names is that the Europeans expanded a lot farther.
Thande
Donor
Were the two Hyderabads named after each other, or were they both called after two different blokes called Haidar?
Not the kind of naming style that adopts the name from somewhere else which I was referring to, but such names in the line of "Newfound Land", "New South Land", that kind of names....
Fasten your seat belt, and be prepared for a very corny and boring joke from Ambon.... :
Once upon a time, a local Ambonese answered "Os tera lia" to the question of a British sailor who was searching for the continent south of Indonesia archipelago.
Os = You
tera = can't
lia = see
Os tera lia = "You can't see it from here"
The End.
Obviously you can't see Australia from Ambon.
(immediately takes an anti-flame shield)
Fasten your seat belt, and be prepared for a very corny and boring joke from Ambon.... :
Once upon a time, a local Ambonese answered "Os tera lia" to the question of a British sailor who was searching for the continent south of Indonesia archipelago.
Os = You
tera = can't
lia = see
Os tera lia = "You can't see it from here"
The End.
Obviously you can't see Australia from Ambon.
(immediately takes an anti-flame shield)
Both funny and corny at the same time...
Flocculencio
Donor
As I said- this is because they followed a different colonial pattern. They didn't go out exploring to found new colonies. They went on trading voyages to already established societies. In the same way Europeans, when colonising India and South-East Asia didn't really go in for New-this-or-that names either- those are primarily a phenomenon of the settler colonies.