Today I Learned

The Romans divided the world into three equal landmasses before they understood how it was actually laid out and it stuck.

But then you run into the issue that the very concept of continent was inbented to differentiate Europe and Asia.

Same, if they're different continents then Africa is also more than one continent

Continental crusts are an observable and measurable thing

They contain higher concentrations of aluminum whereas you find higher concentrations of magnesium outside of those crusts.

They are geological features and should be categorized accordingly. Eurasia makes way more sense than Europe being its own special thing... Except Europe, historically, likes to pretend the rest of the world doesn't exist in their concepts and as such always considers itself special

This comment has been flagged as DEI /s

If you accept the 7 continent model, there are 23 countries in North America.

Makes sense. You are American too, I take it?

80% of all Russians live in Europe.

Well, it's in Asia and Europe. Big country. If Siberia alone was a country, it would still be the biggest country in the world.

Pangea

Nope. I just saw the Olympic rings, one ring for every continent that participates. They are America, Europe, Oceana, Asia, and Africa.

It's fine enough even all in one language. There's the US state of Georgia and the county of Georgia. And outside the occasional funny misunderstanding, it's usually clear from context.

That’s why there’s always the argument that the country should not be called “America”.

I think, though am not sure, that this comes from the 13 colonies having once been "British America", which was by default what people meant when they talked about "America" in English, which stuck after independence.

E.g., “Deutschland” could refer to all germanic-speaking countries, but everyone recognizes that it just means Germany.

nowadays anyway; before the German Empire was founded, "Deutschland" was usually understood as the entire German-speaking region (what we call "deutschsprachiger Raum" today), and between 1949 and 1990 "Deutschland" could mean the Federal Republic of Germany (usually including West Berlin), or the Federal Republic of Germany plus German Democratic Republic plus Berlin, or Germany in the borders of 1937, or even just East Germany whose constitution initially started "Deutschland ist eine unteilbare demokratische Republik".

Latin Americans really get upset over it, and I think it's just irrational. Let it go.

Yes. Except for the exceptions, which are the exceptions.

To actually answer your question: yes and no. If Europe is a continent, then India definitely is. Both are only separated from the rest of Eurasia by a collision boundary, and Europe's collision boundary isn't even active anymore, IIRC.

Realistically, if you're counting tectonic separation, then the afar triangle is its own continent, as there's an active divergent triple boundary splitting it off from the rest of Africa. The coast of California is a different continent than the rest of north america, because it's split by a transform boundary due to the subducting remnants of the farallon plate (now the Juan De fuca and cocos plates). New Zealand has been accepted to be its own continent for quite some time, since there's a gigantic slab of continental crust underwater to NZ's Northwest. Even still, the southeastern portion would be counted as separate by this hypothetical "boundaries-only" definition, because the transform boundary which has created the South Island Alps splits the south island. Madagascar is its own continental crust, as is Greenland.

Really, if you want to understand the geological boundaries and origins among the areas of the world, I'd recommend considering all of the following five types of data:

1. Cratons (the really old chunks of continental crust that have just been floating and moving around, making up the continental cores, for the last 3.5+ billion years
2. Active Tectonic Boundaries (really useful for understanding why there are mountains, trenches, volcanoes and earthquakes where we observe them)
3. what you can see on a map, like rivers, mountains, isthmuses, and continental shelves (the only thing that our current definition of "continent" actually cares about)
4. anomalous hotspot volcanism (currently hypothesised to be caused by mantle plumes)
5. historical terranes and plates (such as avalonia and the flat-slab subduction causing the Laramide orogeny)

If you're really interested in the tectonic boundaries of earth, check out the Concord Consortium's "Seismic Explorer" online tool. Super fun.

So, TL;DR: the idea of a continent is bullshit, and purely cultural, just like our definition of a planet (see minute physics' videos explaining why the moon should be a planet, and the IAU are bad at definitions)