Re: Southern American accent?

tony cooper <tony_cooper213@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote
On Wed, 9 Apr 2008 22:53:23 +0100, Paul Wolff
<bounceme@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

[Unsnipped - too hard - try a couple of Page Downs and you won't miss
much]

tony cooper <tony_cooper213@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote

Seems like a dead-easy question to me. If a map shows South America
and Central America, it is then a map of "Americas". The "s" cleverly
used to indicate that there two involved.

Are there two?

Bloody hell! It's your map.

Well, it's not, really. I plucked it from cyberspace because it was blank and showed the landmass I wanted to show. I really have no idea how you can look at it and start counting Americas on it, and stop when you get to two.

My view is that the Americas are all places that could
be called Americas, and that it's impossible to say how many Americas
there are, because they are amorphous and dependent upon whims of
labelling. Show me a map of land from Mexico to Tierra del Fuego, and I
can't count the Americas there. Where's Mesoamerica, for a start?

You linked to a map with two of the Americas: South and Central.

Are you telling me there's no Mesoamerica there on that map? I can see it, if I squint a bit.

So I can answer, and the answer is signalled above. It isn't
automatically the southern Americas rather than [S/s]outhern America,
because I don't enumerate Americas. From where I stand on the sunrise
side of the pond, when geography edges ahead of politics it is America
as continent that has primacy of meaning, and when talking accent
distribution it seemed that geography was called for. If we were
talking politics, then America as country might well have taken first
meaning, and Southern American would still be waiting for the Robert E
Lee.

It's a bit unsettling to read a post that appears to be written by
Mike Lyle in his usual manner, but is written in all earnestness by
someone else.

Hmm. I'm not sure how to take that. Though from my POV, it's Mike who is someone else. NTTAWWBSE. Most people are.
--
Paul
.

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