【 Quora 】:“东方和西方”叫法的起源 [美国媒体]

Given the Earth is an oblate spheroid in shape, what is the basis to say that the USA is in the West and some other country is in the East?

【 Quora 】:“东方和西方”叫法的起源



Do you know the real name of Japan?
Nihon / Nippon (日本) means The Land of the Rising Sun. In other words, the Eastern country.
Việt Nam (越南) means the land of the Southern Viet people. The Southern country.
China is named Zhōngguó (中国), the Middle Country.
In the realm of Chinese culture, China is in the centre. Vietnam is in the south, and Japan is in the east. By the way, the traditional name of Korea is Joseon (朝鲜) and one of the possible translations is the Land of the Morning Freshness.
Sinosphere as it looked 900 years ago.

你知道日本的真实名字吗?
日本,意味着太阳升起的地方。换句话说，就是东方的国家。
越南，意味着处于南部，越南人民的土地。是南部的国家。
中国，意味着中间的国家。
在中国文化领域中，中国处于中心地位。越南在南部，日本在东部。顺便说一下,传统的韩国名字是朝鲜，可能的翻译的意思是清晨新鲜的国家。
这是900年前的中国。

If Chinese culture dominated in today’s world, USA and Brazil would be seen as Far Eastern countries. On the contrary, they would call Afghanistan and Iran Western countries. And the maps of the world have been absolutely different. Something like this one.

如果中国文化在当今世界处于主导地位，那么美国和巴西将被视为远东国家。相反，阿富汗和伊朗则被称为西方国家。而世界地图将会完全不同。像这样。

Or like this one.

或这样

But the modern world is dominated by Western culture, the West meaning Europe and North America.
Wait a minute? Why do they call themselves Western? Isn’t it strange? If their culture is dominating, they could call themselves the Middle Countries, right? Nobody would oppose their right to do so. But no, they persist to call themselves Western, despite the fact that in most traditional cultures the east was revered and the west was seen in a pejorative light.
I think there can be two explanations. First is simple and geographical. Oblivious of lands beyond the Atlantic Ocean, the English, the French, the Portuguese and the Spaniards were used to live in the extreme west of the known world. When they discovered America, they were already accustomed to be ‘the West’ so they just adopted America in their family of Western nations. And, seeing themselves as leaders of Europe, they finally persuaded other Europeans that they were westerners, too.
But I have another explanation. The Western culture is based on the Roman Empire. Latin is still extensively used in various domains. French have Pantheon. Americans have Capitol and Senate and such cities as Cincinnati. Russians had pretended to be the third Rome. One Roman Empire was destroyed in 1806 and another one in 1922. We may be not aware of it, but our culture is still based on Roman Empire.
Here’s the map of Roman Empire in 395.

但是现代世界是被西方文化所主导，西方则意味着欧洲和北美。
等等?为什么他们也称自己为西方人?这不是很奇怪吗?如果他们的文化占据统治地位，他们可以称自己为中间国家，对吧?没有人会反对他们这样做的权利。但不，他们坚持称自己为西方国家，尽管在大多数传统文化中，东方意味着是受人尊敬的，而西方则被视为贬义。
我认为有两种解释。首先是最简单的地理因素。遗忘掉大西洋以外的土地，英国人，法国人，葡萄牙人和西班牙人都生活在这个已知世界的最西部。当他们发现美国时，他们已经习惯了叫自己为“西方”，而且他们是在西方国家的家庭中收养了美国。作为欧洲的领导人，他们最终说服了其他欧洲人，他们也是西方人。
但我还有另一个解释。西方文化是以罗马帝国为基础的。拉丁语仍然广泛地应用于各种领域。法国的万神殿。美国的国会和参议院，还有像辛辛那提这样的城市。俄国人假装自己是第三个罗马。一个罗马帝国在1806年被摧毁（译者加：指的可能是神圣罗马帝国），另一个在1922年被摧毁（译者加：指的可能是奥斯曼帝国）。我们可能没有意识到，我们的文化仍然是以罗马帝国为基础的。
这是公元395年罗马帝国的地图。



Here you are. The distinction is obvious. There is only the West and the East. There is no middle. Not even Italy can pretend to be the Middle Country.
The Western Europe and the Eastern. Only the border moved a bit westwards since 395. That’s why Yugoslavia was considered an eastern European country. 
Everything eastwards of the Eastern Europe is also East - Near East, Middle East and finally China and Japan which are Far East. Everything westwards of the Western Europe is also West - up until USA which are Far West, the super-West. Of course, as the planet is round, Far East lies westwards of Far West. Well, it is not the strangest of the paradoxes of our worldview.

看这里。区别是显而易见的。这张地图只有西方和东方。没有中间。甚至连意大利都不能假装自己是中部国家。
西欧和东欧。从395年起到现在，只有边界向西移动了一点。这就是为什么南斯拉夫被认为是一个东欧国家。
东欧的东边仍然叫东部，近东，中东，最后是远东的中国和日本。西欧的所有部分都称为西方，直到美国西边的大西部。当然，由于地球是圆的，远东位于远西的西部。好吧，在我们世界观中，这并不是奇怪的矛盾。

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The distinction between East and West is based on the prime meridian, a concept originally developed for astronomy. The earliest known prime meridian in the western world (or its antecedents) was located at Babylon, going back at least to 12:00 noon (local time) February 26, 747 BC. That date and time was also the starting point astronomers used to count the exact number of days that elapsed between different astronomical events.
At some point they moved the prime meridian to Alexandria, Egypt, later to Baghdad. At one time it was at the headquarters of the Teutonic Knights in East Prussia, where Copernicus had his observatory.
In the Age of Exploration, various countries struggled for control of the prime meridian, putting at Tenerife (Canary Islands), Faro (Portugal), and various other places.
Finally the British won and put the prime meridian here:

东西方的区别是根据最初天文学发展的子午线上。西方世界已知的最早的子午线(或其前身)位于巴比伦，至少可以追溯到公元前747年2月26日中午12点(当地时间)。那个日期和时间是天文学家用来计算历史上不同天文事件的确切天数的起始点。
在某一时刻，他们把最初的子午线移动到了埃及的亚历山大，后来又转移到了巴格达。后来，它被移到位于东普鲁士的条顿骑士团的总部，哥白尼在那里有他的天文台。
在探索的年代，许多国家都在为控制本初子午线而努力，想把它放在特内里费(加那利群岛)、法罗(葡萄牙)或其他地方。
最后，英国人赢了，把本初子午线放在了这里:



You can’t see it in the picture, but there’s a vertical hairline in the lens of the eyepiece in this telescope, Airy’s Great Circle Transit Telescope.
That’s where East meets West, and where all the world’s times zone get coordinated.

你无法在图片中看到，但它在望远镜的目镜上有一个垂直的细线，这是艾里的大圆轨道望远镜。
这就是东西方交汇的地方，也是世界上所有时区协调的地方。

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Mainly for historical reasons. The world culture has been dominated by what is know as the Western civilization, that more accurately should be called European civilization. Thus the name referring to a particular country or region depends on the point of reference, so China is in the East from Europe and USA is in the West, although USA is typically included in “the West” more as a label for the group of countries that are part of the European civilization and share the same cultural and historical heritage.

主要是因为历史原因。世界文化被西方文明所主宰，更准确地来说是欧洲文明。因此这个名字取决于一个特定的国家或地区的参考点,所以中国在东方，欧洲和美国在西方,美国通常是被包含在“西方”标签群的国家，是欧洲文明的一部分,共享相同的文化和历史遗产。

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The choice of prime meridian (the meridian at 0° used as the reference from which longitude east and west is measured) is entirely arbitrary because there is no physically definable starting point like the equator. In the fourth century BC Eratosthenes selected Alexandria as the starting meridian for longitude, and in medi times the Canary Islands off the coast of Africa were used since they were then the westernmost outpost of western civilisation. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, many countries used their capital city as the prime meridian for the nation’s maps, including the meridian through the centre of the White House in Washington, D.C., for early nineteenth-century maps. You can imagine the confusion that must have existed when trying to locate places on maps from several countries. The problem was eliminated in 1884 when the International Meridian Conference selected as the international standard the British prime meridian—defined by the north–south optical axis of a telescope at the Royal Observatory in Greenwich, a suburb of London. It is is called the Greenwich meridian.
So, since that time everything on one side of the Greenwich meridian is west, and everything on the other side is east.
Then, to further establish what is east and what is west we have the International Date Line (IDL).
The International Date Line (IDL) is an imaginary line on Earth's surface defining the boundary between one day and the next.
The International Date Line is located halfway around the world from the prime meridian (0° longitude) or about 180° east (or west) .
The Dateline Is Not Straight
The dateline runs from the North Pole to the South Pole and marks the divide between the Western and Eastern Hemisphere. It is not straight but zigzags to avoid political and country borders and to not cut some countries in half. On timeanddate.com's Time Zone Map, the IDL is shown as a black line.
What Happens When You Cross the Dateline?
When you cross the International Date Line from west to east, you subtract a day, and if you cross the line from east to west, you add a day.
Depending on which time zone the country follows, the time difference on either side of the line is not always 24 hours. For example, if you travel the 1061 kilometers (659 miles) across the dateline from Baker Island to Tokelau you have to add 25 hours, or 1 day and 1 hour.
Drawn up in 1884
The 180° meridian was selected as the International Date Line because it mostly runs through the sparsely populated Central Pacific Ocean. It was decided at the International Meridian Conference in 1884 in Washington, D.C. where 26 countries attended.


本初子午线的选择(子午线位于0°，是测量东部和西部经度的根据)是完全任意的,因为没有像赤道那样在物理上可以定义。公元前4世纪，埃拉托斯特尼选择亚历山大港作为经度的起始经线，中世纪时，非洲海岸的加那利群岛被用来作为西方文明最西端的原点。在十八世纪和十九世纪，许多国家把他们的首都作为国家地图的主要子午线，包括在华盛顿特区的以白宫为中心的子午线。在19世纪早期的地图，你可以想象，当试图用几个国家的地图上寻找某个位置时，一定是存在着混乱的。这个问题在1884年被解决了，当时国际子午线会议选择了国际标准，即由伦敦郊区格林威治皇家天文台的一架望远镜的南北光学轴所定义的国际标准。这就是所谓的格林尼治子午线。

所以，从那时起，格林尼治子午线一边的部分都是西方的，而另一边的部分都是东方的。
然后，为了进一步确定什么是东方，什么是西方，我们有国际日期变更线。
国际日期线是地球表面上的一条假想线，它定义了一天与下一天之间的边界。
国际日期变更线位于本初子午线以东大半个地球，约180°(或格林尼治以西)。
国际日期变更线不是直的。
这条线从北极到南极，标志着西半球和东半球的分界线。但它不是直的，它是曲折的，为了躲开政治和国家的边界，不把一些国家分割成两半。在www.timeanddate.com的时区地图上，国际日期变更线显示为一条黑线。

当你穿过变更线时会发生什么?
当你从西向东穿越国际日期线时，你会减去一天，如果你从东到西穿过这条线，你会增加一天。
根据国家的时区不同，线路两侧的时差并不总是24小时。例如，如果你从贝克岛到托克劳穿越，大约1061公里(659英里)，你必须增加25小时，或1天1小时。
这个拟定在1884年
180°子午线被选为国际日期变更线,因为它主要贯穿在人烟稀少的太平洋中央。它是在1884年的国际子午线会议上决定的，当时在华盛顿特区有26个国家参加。

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The known world until 1492 was Europe and Asia (and Africa, but it’s not relevant to an East-West discussion).
Although we refer to Europe and Asia as separate continents, they are not, it would better to refer to the one continuous continental land mass as Eurasia, a well-known term used in geology.
There is an arbitrary division of the land mass along the Caucasus mountains, which divides western Russia into Europe, and eastern Russia into Asia. Imagine if North America was artificially divided into two continents in this way using the Rocky Mountains as the dividing line. That would put Cheyenne, Denver, and Sante Fe in the “East America” continent, simply because they are east of the Rocky Mountains. Salt Lake City, Phoenix, and Los Angeles would all be part of the “West America” continent, simply because they are west of the Rocky Mountains. This is silly. But this is what the Europeans did when they invented the idea of continents. They saw western Russia as modern and European-like, but saw eastern Russia as different, more like the really different Chinese, so eastern Russia became part of Asia.
Since there is really just the one land mass of Eurasia, the western part (Europe) was thought of as West, and the eastern part (China and Japan) was thought of as East. Neat and simple. The sun rises from the ocean in the East (Japan is called the “land of the rising sun”) then the sun sets in the West into the ocean, off the coasts of Ireland, France, and Spain.
Confusion erupted when Columbus discovered another continent, the Americas. This was a real continent, separated from other land masses by oceans.
Columbus was sailing west near 20 degrees north latitude. Latitudes were well understood at the time because you could compute latitude from the stars. All the geographers and explorers knew that 20 degrees north latitude in east Eurasia was the southern tip of China, and a group of islands known as the East Indies. Columbus didn’t know about the Americas yet. Columbus knew he was at 20 degrees north, so he assumed the islands he encountered were the islands south of China called the East Indies.
I hate to digress too far, but it is often said that Columbus thought he sailed to India. Ridiculous. All the educated peoples of Eurasia knew that Europe was in the West, India was in the middle, and China and Japan were in the East. Marco Polo traveled extensively from Europe, past India, and into China. Marco Polo wrote a book on his travels, and drew maps of Eurasia showing the relationship of Europe, India, and China across the vast continent. Columbus NEVER thought he landed in India. He thought he landed in the island group of the East Indies. When he sailed along the south side of Cuba, the island was so big that he figured “this can’t be an island”, so he guessed that the south Cuba coast must be the south mainland of China, but nowhere near India.
Eventually Columbus and the rest of the world realized that he didn’t get to the East of Eurasia, he actually encountered a new continent to the “west of the West”, a new land even farther west of Europe. To differentiate between the previously known islands of the East Indies, and the new islands that Columbus discovered, they simply referred to Columbus’s new islands as the “West Indies”. The islands of the Caribean are still called that today. The East Indies is what Columbus thought he’d sailed to, the West Indies is what he actually sailed to.
In summary: West means the west of Eurasia, East means the east of Eurasia. Since Columbus was sailing west when he discovered the Americas, the Americas had to be considered West too, even more West.

1492年之前的世界面貌是欧洲和亚洲(和非洲，但它与东西方的讨论无关)。
虽然我们把欧洲和亚洲看作是不同的大陆，但它们不是，它其实是一个连续的大陆叫做欧亚大陆，这是一个众所周知的术语，在地质学中使用。
在高加索山脉沿线，有一条将土地任意划分的线，将俄罗斯西部划分为欧洲，俄罗斯东部分为亚洲。想象一下，如果北美被人为地划分成两个大陆，以落基山脉为分界线。这将使得怀俄明州，丹佛和加利福利亚州在“美洲东部”大陆，仅仅因为他们在落基山脉东部。盐湖城、凤凰城和洛杉矶都将成为“美洲西部”大陆的一部分，因为它们位于落基山脉以西。这是愚蠢的。但这就是欧洲人发明大陆概念的时候所做的。他们把西方的俄罗斯看成是现代的、欧洲的，但是他们认为俄罗斯的东部是不同的，更像是不同的中国人，所以俄罗斯东部成为亚洲的一部分。

由于欧亚大陆实际上只有一块陆地，西方(欧洲)被认为是西方，而东方(中国和日本)被认为是东方。整洁、简单。太阳从东方的海洋升起(日本被称为“旭日之国”)，然后太阳西沉，西入大海，逐渐离开爱尔兰、法国和西班牙的海岸。
哥伦布发现美洲大陆时，十分困惑。这是一个真正的大陆，与其他陆地通过海洋分隔开来。
哥伦布在北纬20度附近向西航行。当时的纬度很好理解，因为你可以通过恒星计算出纬度。所有的地理学家和探险者都知道，欧亚大陆东部北纬20度是中国的南端，是一群被称为东印度群岛的群岛。哥伦布还不知道美洲。哥伦布知道他在北纬20度，所以他假设他遇到的这些岛屿是中国南方的群岛，称为东印度群岛。

我讨厌离题太远，但人们常说哥伦布以为他航行到印度去了。荒谬。欧亚大陆所有受过教育的人都知道欧洲在西方，印度在中间，中国和日本在东方。马可·波罗从欧洲、印度和中国跑了一路。马可·波罗在游记中写了一本书，画了欧亚大陆的地图，展示了欧洲、印度和中国大陆之间的关系。哥伦布从来没有想到他会在印度登陆。他以为自己落在了东印度群岛上。当他沿着古巴的南岸航行时，这个岛是如此之大，以至于他认为“这不可能是一个岛屿”，因此他猜测，这个南古巴海岸一定是中国的南部，但附近却没有印度。
最终，哥伦布和世界其他国家意识到他没有到达欧亚大陆的东部，他实际上遇到了一个新的大陆，那就是“西部的西部”，这是一个更靠近欧洲西部的新大陆。为了区分东印度群岛这个已知的岛屿和哥伦布发现的新岛屿，他们只是把哥伦布的新岛屿称为“西印度群岛”。今天，加勒比人的岛屿仍然被称之如此。东印度群岛是哥伦布认为他航行到的，而西印度群岛才是他真正航行到的地方。
综上所述:西方是欧亚大陆的西部，东方是欧亚大陆的东部。自从哥伦布发现美洲后，就开始向西航行，美洲也被认为是西部，甚至叫更西的地方。