1542: Naming a Big Region for a Small One: africa and asia Mar 4, 2019

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While in most cases, it is easier to have a general umbrella term for a collection of related topics, but sometimes this happens the other way around. Like in the case of the use of 'Holland', which can refer to the netherlands but is actually only a region of it, both 'Africa', and 'Asia' come from words that initially only described small regions. In the case of Asia, it is thought that the name comes from a Greek word relating to sunrise, and hence the East. However, this was only in relation to Anatolia, which coincidentally today is sometimes called Asia Minor. In the case of Africa, the origin is more disputed, but no matter what, the namesake was only a province in the Roman Empire around modern-day Tunisia.
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