Agreed, this is dank knowledge

Except for slavic tribes, when referred to them as “the mute ones”.

You can read about the Chinese name for Japan here

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Names_of_Japan

It's true, why wouldn't you want to be in the center of the world? I wonder if the Persians had similar thoughts about themselves, being at the center point of the silk road. The other option is to take pride in being at an extreme, which a few cultures do, but I don't know how common that is in relation.

Dubai is pretty central for the inhabited old world. IIRC the centerpoint of land on earth ends up in France, because of the Americas, and the higher landmass in the northern hemisphere, but nobody thinks of it as a global crossroads. Ice caps, mountains, the rough Atlantic and the world's largest desert make sure of that.

Alkebulan (the native name for Africa) is the cradle of humanity and the only continent where everyone there agreed what said continent was called for all of recorded/known history.

I'm sorry, you otherwise have interesting points but that's nutty. Africa has seen more languages and cultures than anywhere else, what with being our home continent, and there's no way they all coordinated their name for the continent - which maybe nobody know the extent of until the invention of proper seafaring.

I’m pretty sure Alkebulan was actually a name given to Africa by Islamic settlers. There are thousands of indigenous names for Africa. In the words of the African man who told me about it, “we had thousands of names for Africa because we didn’t know we were supposed to only have one. Each person had their own name for it.”

Good to know.

It might not be a mere country by a long shot but the one thing I find most interesting about Africa (IIRC) is that despite the linguistic variation and the number of nations being no less than any other continent has ever had, every precolonial culture in "Africa" referred to it as Alkebulan (I think that's the romanized pronunciation) with the possible (partial?) exception of Egypt.

That said, my memory about that feels sketchy. Can anyone confirm or dispute if Alkebulan is the actual name used by the local languages? Claiming I'm sure about this without actually checking feels disrespectful, but I no longer trust DuckDuckGo or Startpage because their use of Google's algorithm means NewPipe is censored from all search engines except Bing and Ecosia and search results have been uninspiring since ~2017 thanks to enshittification.

Hold on, checking Wikipedia...

Edit: No trace of the word itself on wp, but it did bring up the Akebu language when I searched it. Anyone know how much I was wrong? Or is this just survivorship bias due to me only knowing how to speak/read English?

Yes, Silla was a kingdom, and then it became the main ruling kingdom for a while, and then it fragmented again, but one of the fragments was still called Silla... :)