Why do most of the continents begin and end with the letter 'a' apart from Europe?

Question

Antarctica
Africa
Australasia
Asia
America

I know it's North and South Jambo you ****, but the common name is 'America' also Oceania was called Australasia in the past, so why did that begin and end with 'a' then? Go stick your head back up yer ****, twunt.

It wouldn't matter to a small mind like yours Nicky. I'm interested in language and its origins.

Answer 1

EUROPE:/ EUROPA
"In Greek mythology, Europa was a Phoenician princess who was abducted by Zeus in bull form and taken to the island of Crete, where she gave birth to Minos. For Homer, Europa was a mythological queen of Crete, not a geographical designation. Later Europa stood for mainland Greece and by 500 BC its meaning was extended to lands to the north."

AFRICA:
"The name Africa came into Western use through the Romans, who used the name Africa terra - "land of the Afri" (plural, or "Afer" singular) - for the northern part of the continent, as the province of Africa with its capital Carthage, corresponding to modern-day Tunisia.

The origin of Afer may either come from:

the Phoenician `afar, dust;
the Afri, a tribe-possibly Berber-who dwelt in North Africa in the Carthage area;
the Greek word aphrike, meaning without cold (see also List of traditional Greek place names);
or the Latin word aprica, meaning sunny.
The historian Leo Africanus (1495-1554) attributed the origin to the Greek word phrike (meaning "cold and horror"), combined with the negating prefix a-, so meaning a land free of cold and horror. But the change of sound from ph to f in Greek is datable to about the first century, so this cannot really be the origin of the name.

Egypt was considered part of Asia by the ancients, and first assigned to Africa by the geographer Ptolemy (85 - 165 AD), who accepted Alexandria as Prime Meridian and made the isthmus of Suez and the Red Sea the boundary between Asia and Africa. As Europeans came to understand the real extent of the continent, the idea of Africa expanded with their knowledge."

ASIA:
"The word Asia entered English via Latin from Ancient Greek, first attested in Herodotus, where it refers to Asia Minor, or for the purposes of the Persian Wars, to the Persian Empire as opposed to Greece and Egypt. Homer knows a Trojan ally named Asios, son of Hyrtacus, a ruler over several towns, and also describes a marsh as 461).

The Greek term was likely from Assuwa, a 14th century BC confederation of states in ancient Anatolia. Hittite assu- "good" is a likely element in that name. Elamites numeous in the east called themselves As, and at least one Aryan people on the central Eurasian steppes called themselves Asi. Alternatively, the ultimate etymology of the term may be from the Akkadian word asu, which means "to go out" or "to rise", referring to the direction of the sun at sunrise in the Middle East. Compare to this the suggestion for the etymology of Europe from Semitic erebu "to set". The motives for the names of Asia and Europe would thus mirror each other, much like the terms orient and occident (the names Anatolia and Levant likewise signify "sunrise"). This suggestion is widely quoted, but it suffers from the fact that Anatolia from an Akkadian or generally Semitic perspective does not lie in the east."

THE AMERICAS:
"The earliest known use of the name America for the continents of the Americas dates from 1507. It appears on a globe and a large map created by the German cartographer Martin WaldseemÌller in Saint-Dié-des-Vosges. An accompanying book, Cosmographiae Introductio, explains that the name was derived from the Latinized version of the explorer Amerigo Vespucci's name, Americus Vespucius, in its feminine form, America, as the other continents all have Latin feminine names.
A few alternative theories regarding the continents' naming have been proposed, but none of them have any widespread acceptance. One alternative first proposed by a Bristol antiquary and naturalist, Alfred Hudd, was that America is derived from Richard Amerike, a merchant from Bristol, who is believed to have financed John Cabot's voyage of discovery from England to Newfoundland in 1497. Supposedly, Bristol fishermen had been visiting the coast of North America for at least a century before Columbus' voyage and WaldseemÃŒller's maps are alleged to incorporate information from the early British journeys to North America. The theory holds that a variant of Amerike's name appeared on an early British map
Another theory, first advanced by Jules Marcou in 1875 and later recounted by novelist Jan Carew, is that the name America derives from the district of Amerrique in Nicaragua. The gold-rich district of Amerrique was purportedly visited Vespucci, for whom the name became synonymous with gold. According to Marcou, Vespucci later applied the name to the New World, and even changed the spelling of his own name from Alberigo to Amerigo to reflect the importance of the discovery.

Vespucci's role in the naming issue, like his exploratory activity, is unclear. Some sources say that he was unaware of the widespread use of his name to refer to the new landmass.

AUSTRALIA:
The name Australia is derived from the Latin australis, meaning southern. Legends of an "unknown southern land" (terra australis incognita) date back to the Roman times, and were commonplace in geography, but were not based on any actual knowledge of the continent. The Dutch adjectival form Australische ("Australian", in the sense of "southern") was used by Dutch officials in Batavia to refer to the newly discovered land to the south as early as 1638."

ANTARCTICA:
"...from Greek word for "opposite the Arctic". Although myths and speculation about a Terra Australis ("Southern Land") go back to antiquity, the first commonly accepted sighting of the [antarctic] continent occurred in 1820 and the first verified landing in 1821..."

Answer 2

I actually conducted my own study to determine what letters are most common in the English dictionary. I didn't study the dictionary, but just about 50 pages of digital text from a website where people can post responses to questions (much like this site), only any one can post as much as they like. I was building a random word generator. Here is a list of words (just as an example of why I did so much research to build it):
rioohn
tlrilomre
frdpaa
toeudhfoc
nuote
OK, so you get the idea of that... The point is that the generator uses letters at the same frequency as in the English dictionary. And you usually get words that are slightly pronounceable (not tmttdthlgkl).

What I found was that capital A is a very common letter. IE, commonly used in names and titles. Here is why: (I didn't have the time to finish my post earlier, and under pressure to produce an answer I said it was for random reasons…)

So, anyhow, when a name starts with the letter A, it seems to role off the tongue. In fact, in general it is not the letter A that rolls of the tongue, but any vowel. Antarctica, Ontario, Europe... It’s so much more easier to say these words than it is to say something like: France. It takes less muscle in your mouth to say them because you barely have to do any work to pronounce vowels. Furthermore, there is a vowel in every word, so we have a lot of practice pronouncing them (as cheesy as it sounds). That also makes names starting with vowels easier to make up (because we have the simplicity of vowels on the mind). And that is why we see a lot of names of places starting with A, E, I, and O (U is hard to pronounce)

Answer 3

It's just a coincidence. Africa and Europe were named after ancient gods. Australia means south in Latin. For Antarctica ant means opposite (anti-) opposite-of-arctic, but even arctic means bear in Greek. America was named after the map-maker Amerigo Vespucci, who put The new World on a map for the first time. Lastly, no one really know where Asia came from, but most likely it was an ancient god.

Answer 4

Can we include hypothetical or lost continents? Ok, how about Mu? Mu is the name of a lost land, or hypothetical vanished continent, that was once located in the Pacific Ocean but is now (like Atlantis and Lemuria, with which it is sometimes identified) believed to have sunk beneath the waters.

Answer 5

They are given feminine names, hence, the names ending with the letter "a". This is most likely influenced by the Romans where names ending with "a" are feminine.

Answer 6

Australasia is now called Oceania
America isnt a continent, North America and South America are.
so its not most its 3 out of 7!

Answer 7

Becouse the first letter for the alphabet is A. so the continents were named befor we came up with B LOL

Answer 8

To show that the Europe does not have an A game any longer.

Answer 9

because of adam to adam, according to scripure. and your going to have to guess about europe beguining and ending with an e. after it was changed from beguinning with an e and ending in a.

Answer 10

Hey, I never thought of that!

Didn't Europe used to be called Europa, anyway?

Answer 11

I think its because people's homeland were like a 'mother land' and kind of assued to be
a she (like mother nature) In most langauages, if it ends in 'a' then its female.