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AZANEA

TYPES OF EXONYMS

SOUTH AFRICA

Beyond the Congo Rainforest and Selena Plateau lies Azanea, which remained the domain of hunter-gatherers longer than most other regions in the world, which remains the case in the League of Nation's Kalahari Reserve. Some of the pleasantest weather and landscapes are found in this region raised by escarpments.

 

In the eastern part, known as Indoacrea, mercantile guilds from Indea traded with and settled among some of the earliest Bantu peoples to migrate to the region. This early contact allowed for the stone cities of the northern Ophiran Escarpment to reach new levels of social complexity and material wealth. The west and south was then colonized by Flemish, along with French Huguenot, and later, English settlers. Unlike the organic convergence of cultures in the east, European settlers treated native Khoisan and Bantu peoples with prejudice, leading to a history of war and social struggles, the exception being the Cape Coloured society that founded Namiba.

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ON TOPONYMS

Ethnocentrism has always dogged geographers. Atlas Altera is written in English for those of the Anglosphere, who have generally inherited neighbouring European traditions. Here, countries and regions are rendered as if it is the tradition most familiar and accepted in practical usage by native English-speakers in Altera. Thus, the political map of Altera is rendered with exonyms, and the atlas draws deep from situated knowledges while simultaneously attempting to push the boundaries of those knowledges.

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TYPES OF EXONYMS

The names of earth’s landmasses, continents, regions, and toponyms in Libya, Asea, and Erythrea were normalized by Venetian cartographers, who readily brought west maps of the south and east via their contact with the Grecians in Constantinople, a critical nexus point for trafficking things and knowledges across Borealea and Africa until the Age of Discovery. Toponyms of western continental Europea, generally corresponding to historically European Catholic areas, are derived from the naming conventions of the Dieppe school, which was influential until becoming eclipsed by the mapmakers of Antwerp. The Antwerp School made places of the Arctic and Norway known to the rest of Europea. Thus, the -ny, -land, and -ia suffixes generally correspond to these three schools of cartography influential to the English tradition.

The Dieppe School also began to incorporate the less systemic toponyms of the Spanish and Portuguese, which came out of early conquests in Septentrea and Crucea, most of which broke from the practice of naming places after native inhabitants but instead came from the Doctrine of Discovery. The Antwerp School fully normalized the practice of transliterating foreign toponyms through the lens of the regional hegemons in places where there was closer power parity between Europeans and natives, especially in Indea, Serica, and in the parts of Septentrea and Crucea that retained autonomy. The transliterations made in this time preserve the local pronunciations in the 18th and 19th centuries and may now be quite distant to the modern endonyms.

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