151–160 of 244 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Transforming isn't exactly unknown; all insects do it.
Yes, but by the 18.th century, we knew that birds and mammals are a bit more complex than insects and quite shape stable.
And as you can see, we did not in fact know that in the 18th century. Transformations are not so easy to observe directly; they often happen e.g. underground.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Probably fake history. Modern thinking is that Columbus had a pretty good idea where he was going because others had already been there.
Why is the area referred to as "the west Indies" unless he thought it was India
Also, I think Indies was used to refer to Asia in general, rather than specifically India. But am open to correction.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
My experience living in Taiwan is that those terms may literally mean foreigner but their practical usage means white/western people. A native or black american would not be called that. Also, lao wai is the one they go for when they are angry or postering xenophobia amongst each other. I find it to be a needlessly othering term but I try to accept it as not said with explicitly bad intent.
Well, the traditional insult is quite different, 洋鬼子. ("Foreign devils" is the traditional translation.) People who are looking to insult foreigners have no need to use the ordinary, non-insulting word. Though this may be less true in Taiwan; I think 洋鬼子 is fairly Maoist.
But generally you're missing the point. (1) 老外 (lao wai) is an intrinsically othering term, and (2) it's generally applied by race rather than by national origin. It doesn't matter what the literal translation is. The point is about how the word is used.
Here in California many Chinese-speaking transplants use the terms 老外 or 外國人 to refer to white Americans. I always correct them when they do--pointing out that they are the foreigners. It comes off as rude, but that's the point! No one likes to be ostracized or grouped based on the color of their skin, and that's precisely what they were doing when they used the term to refer to white people in the first place.
If I move my life to China or Taiwan, how long do I have live there before I am no longer 老外? What about my kids who grow up there, speaking at a native level and calling the country their home. Are they 老外 too?
Intriguely, Columbus claimed that in 1477, after visiting Bristol, England (which is confirmed), he visited Iceland, where the stories of Markland would have predominated.
And Bristol fishermen were known to fish Icelandic waters and beyond. A major backer of their voyages was Welshman Richard ap Meryk, sometimes elided to Ameryk. There's a theory that the fishermen established a processing station in Newfoundland and called it Ameryka in his honour, associating the left-hand side of the pond with that name in voyagers and cartographers minds.
I thought it was well established that the name America came either directly or indirectly from explorer Amerigo Vespucci.
Why "Christopher Columbus" and not "Cristoforo Colombo"? In Italy the press and media did not convert names into an Italian from the '60. We say New York and Joe Biden. Not Nuova Iorc and Giovanni Baiden.
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It's interesting that in Toscanelli's map it also appears the "Antillia"[0] island mentioned in another comment. There was definitively some knowledge of land in between, maybe they just didn't know it was a huge continent. [0] https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Antillia
If you look to the west from Europe you see a vast sea . It doesn't take a great deal of effort to imagine some form of land beyond or in that sea. You would be quite a boring and unimaginative person to not wonder about this. Edgar Allen Poe's novel The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket details a fictional account of what might be in the Antarctic, an unexplored area in his time. We now know that Poe's ima…
Which people do you mean?
> But it could help explain why Columbus, a Genoese, was prepared to set off across what most contemporaries considered a landless void. I had always thought that Columbus made the trip because he miscalculated the distance around the globe, while everyone else was saying they'd starve before reaching Asia. He was just lucky enough there happened to be land halfway there, and then mistakenly assumed he made it, since…
> and then mistakenly assumed he made it, since the Caribbean was where he wrongly thought Asia was going to be. ... which is why Native Americans have been referred to as "Indians," because Columbus was certain he'd reached the Indies.
This find is not as surprising as the Economist article would have you believe. First, what was written about areas beyond Europe's periphery tended to lag behind actual common knowledge of those areas by hundreds of years. An example would be the concept of "the torrid zone," part of an ancient Greek climatic theory that divided the world into two habitable temperate zones, two uninhabitable frigid zones (at the pol…
Intriguely, Columbus claimed that in 1477, after visiting Bristol, England (which is confirmed), he visited Iceland, where the stories of Markland would have predominated.
And Bristol fishermen were known to fish Icelandic waters and beyond. A major backer of their voyages was Welshman Richard ap Meryk, sometimes elided to Ameryk. There's a theory that the fishermen established a processing station in Newfoundland and called it Ameryka in his honour, associating the left-hand side of the pond with that name in voyagers and cartographers minds.
This find is not as surprising as the Economist article would have you believe. First, what was written about areas beyond Europe's periphery tended to lag behind actual common knowledge of those areas by hundreds of years. An example would be the concept of "the torrid zone," part of an ancient Greek climatic theory that divided the world into two habitable temperate zones, two uninhabitable frigid zones (at the pol…
they really were to their eyes.
We know more about ancient history today than people from the VII century about a 100 years before them
The invasions of the former roman empire in today's Italian territory destroyed most of the historical knowledge and gave birth to dark folk legends that are still well alive today, even though historians have debunked the myth of the middle-ages as dark times.