Talk:List of etymologies of administrative divisions

message: 1. If every state/province/other region in every country were to be added, this list would become enormous.
2. Should we have separate articles for the etymology of place names in various countries?
:1. It would indeed.
:2. We should.
:I added two towns in New Zealand then saw that most other countries seemed to stop at regionsbut with nothing on the page to say where the limit should be. Should have a specific "towns etc" link on the page after the name of each country that does have its own towns etc list. Robin Patterson 22:20, 27 Apr 2004 (UTC)
thread_title: enormous

message: I was thinking of moving all territory/colony names (Greenland, Faroes etc.) to the List of country name etymologies. 
My idea is that that page covers all countries and territories (a lot of which are near independent anyway) and that this page covers only sub-national regions, states, counties, towns, cities etc.
However, I don't want to move things before people have agreed to it.
---
Some of these are incorrect. Gaelic Alba for Scotland comes from some unknown name that used to be for all of Britain which also gave the classical names for the island like Albion. Unrelated to "Highlands" (Gaelic doesn't even have a name for thisthe Highland vs. Lowland distinction is, well, Lowland, of the Anglic peoples). "Caledonia" comes from an ethnic name for a Pictish or Brythonic people, the Caledonii, "The Hard Ones", Caledonia was their country.--172.209.252.101 03:36, 13 Sep 2004 (UTC)
thread_title:  territory/colony 

message: I foresee problems in grouping by continent: we lack universal agreed boundaries and groupings. Will Turkish subdivisions belong in Europe, in Asia, or in both? Russia already has similar problems of definition. Where does Antarctica fit in? And Georgia? And Sinai? And the Philippines? And the islands in the Indian Ocean? Does Greenland classify as a continent or not? Why gratuitously insult Australians and Americans by grouping them together?I propose reverting to an alphabetical structure based on the names of nation-states.Pedant17 00:37, 10 February 2006 (UTC)
replies: text:  Hi Fastifex: – You don't appear to see my concern.Suppose I want to look up the etymology of Sakhalin right now.  I know it as an island in the Pacific, so I look up "Oceania"even if I find "Oceania" under "New World"nothing doing. But I know that Sakhalin lies close to Japan and to the Asian mainland, so I try looking in "Asia"still nothing. I have to remember that the Urals may form the boundary between Asia and Europe, and that Russia might apear under Europe (rather than under Asia), and sure enough, there, awkwardly, I find "Russia (including Asian east)"whatever that may mean. Ease of use has gone out the window.Pedant17 05:33, 5 March 2006 (UTC)
replies: text:  Worse, the case of Sakhalin shows how terribly  Eurocentric the article has become. In pure geographic terms, Europe barely counts as a continent at all, forming a mere peninsula of the Eurasian landmass. I hadn't realised the insulting nature of 'New World' until you pointed it outbut that provides even more evidence of Eurocentric bias.Pedant17 05:33, 5 March 2006 (UTC)

text:  Back to Sakhalin. In the final analysis, to find its etymology here without searching (and one might have difficulty in searching given the non-English-style spelling of such names), one has to know simply that Sakhalin forms part of the Russian Federation. We have a problem right nowan NPOV issue of cultural biascompare http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:NPOV#Anglo-American_focus. So why not revert to putting all the countries in alphabetical order and avoiding all this rigamarole of dead ends and red-herring trails? Splitting entries for Turkey and Kazakhstan would make matters worse for navigation and for maintenance, not better!Does anyone see advantages in subdividing the globe into debatable continents and pseudo-continents for this particular article?Pedant17 05:33, 5 March 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: So switch it back to alphabetical. That way, you won't have to divvy up multi-continental countries into separate paragraphs (Denmark/Greenland, Russia, Kazakhstan, France and her Départements d'outre-mer, etc). And if Turkey is deemed to be in Asia (as is obviously Iran), then how does one explain Armenia as a little European peninsula in an Asian Sea? Obviously because the division of "Europe" and "Asia" is political, not geographical. It would be like declaring sub-Saharan Africa as a separate continent. And the whole "Old World"/"New World" schtick is extremely Eurocentric and therefore POV (I'm sure the original inhabitants of Australia, Canada, Chile etc did not consider their lands particularly "new"). So: G'head. Be bold. SigPig 04:06, 6 March 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Grouping by continents 

message: Andhra also denotes "south" in Sanskrit 
I never heard this!
Any reference?  —Preceding unsigned comment added by 59.160.166.141 (talk) 07:27, 3 September 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Andhra also denotes "south" in Sanskrit  

message: This really depends which language you're speaking. In Scottish Gaelic it's still the current name of the country, and in English it's still occasionally used poetically or in the names of companies, etc. The article should probably be updated to reflect this. The only actual former name for Scotland (as in fully never used any more) that I know of is Pictland (meaning "Land of the Picts", obviously) which should probably be added in if we're going to discuss former names too. Another point to mention is that whilst the Celtic name for Wales is discussed here, the Celtic language names for England are not (all of them derive ultimately from "Saxon" or some variant rather than the English name which derives from "Angles"), nor is the name for Cornwall - neither the English nor native name - which I'm sure could be easily paraphrased from the corresponding article. Foolish Child (talk) 18:42, 11 August 2014 (UTC)
thread_title:  Alba as a "Former Endonym" for Scotland 

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