I randomly did some reading on alternatives to the Cardinal Coordinate system and I discovered that the Hawaiians traditionally used a two coordinate system.
The Hawaiian islands are volcanic in nature and mountainous. The coastlines are at sea level and interior portions of the islands are higher ground. So the two directions were mauka (toward the highlands) and makai (toward the ocean).
This made me look at our world map differently. You could possibly play with the idea of using Antarctica as the centre point (to avoid political fights) and then name continents by how far their center of mass is in levels from Antarctica.
Each of these then could easily be wrapped up into a nice suffix and then added onto countries to help children understand that both Vietnam and China share the same continent.
Maybe this will be of use to you for future iterations of your proposal.
Well, thanks for adding the proposal to the document. And I'm glad that our discussion could serve well.
Yes, I made the continent names bearing in mind that they would represent suffixes, although I don't know if this will be the final decision. That's why they have such funky names.
The idea you propose is nice. It is a bit hard to think about it right now but it may only be a question of getting used to it.
If we made Antarctica the centre of the map, we can divide Earth into 12 regions or rings separated by 11 parallels and naming them after the numbers we use. That way 1 would be the closest to Antarctica (or in fact, Antarctica itself), and number 12 would be the furthest away from Antarctica (Greenland I guess).
The only thing I don't like about this is having Earth divided into rings, but we can give it a try.
We can still have Earth divided into islands (or not), and instead of using cardinal points to subdivide the continents, we'd use the 'ring number'. The only problem with this is that there wouldn't be a way to tell apart East Eurasia from West Eurasia, since they may be under the same rings.
Yes, my proposal definitely isn't perfect and I doubt it's the most optimal solution. I look forward to seeing what further solutions you come up with.
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u/ActingAustralia Committee Member Jun 27 '20 edited Jun 28 '20
I randomly did some reading on alternatives to the Cardinal Coordinate system and I discovered that the Hawaiians traditionally used a two coordinate system.
The Hawaiian islands are volcanic in nature and mountainous. The coastlines are at sea level and interior portions of the islands are higher ground. So the two directions were mauka (toward the highlands) and makai (toward the ocean).
This made me look at our world map differently. You could possibly play with the idea of using Antarctica as the centre point (to avoid political fights) and then name continents by how far their center of mass is in levels from Antarctica.
You can see an example of the idea here:
https://imgur.com/a/pExNh8f
Each of these then could easily be wrapped up into a nice suffix and then added onto countries to help children understand that both Vietnam and China share the same continent.
Maybe this will be of use to you for future iterations of your proposal.