Eorzea or Etheirys?

[Iscah]

In the strictest of senses, the "real world" seems more like Aldenard is Africa...

Aldenard is not Africa. It is, loosely, Europe turned sideways (before they started aiming for a 1:1 comparison to an Earth map at a large scale), maybe with the northern bit of Africa fused into it, but not the whole continent.

Everything we know so far to be "Meracydian" is from Africa. Maybe it's a hybrid Africa-Australia but we've seen no indication of it to this point. It's more like Africa detached from Europe and drifted southeast.

Meanwhile, Ilsabard seems to be Russia detached from the rest of Asia, which has slid off horizontally to the east to become Othard – which is presumably why they seem to be having a hard time actually squeezing it all into the globe at a convincing size and leaving so much of it as blank ocean.

[Ilisidi]

It exists in German. But regardless would people really pick Mother Hydaelyn for the world and just Hydaelyn for the Primal? I'd have taken it to be the other way around.

I found it very annoying how they kept going on about stars that apparently weren't stars but planets and other things. Especially since German does have a perfectly serviceable word that would have been less confusing.

[Caitlinzulu]

It has bothered me too everytime i read it. A star is not a planet but a sun, the source of heat and light. The stars we see in the sky arent planets at all, its impossible to see them with the naked eye or even the best telescope directly. Its their suns we see.
Please SE stop using this gross mistake.

[Cleretic]

It has bothered me too everytime i read it. A star is not a planet but a sun, the source of heat and light. The stars we see in the sky arent planets at all, its impossible to see them with the naked eye or even the best telescope directly. Its their suns we see.
Please SE stop using this gross mistake.

It's not a 'mistake' in this context, it's deliberately pulled from archaic language; there's a few different civilizations (I believe including Japan) that called the Earth a 'star' using the same word as the ones in the sky. Now in their case it was a genuine misconception, but for FFXIV's writers it's using that old convention to add some of that high fantasy gravitas.

And then there's the weird situation of Geomancers which are apparently an inversion of Astrologians; rather than gathering energy from the stars above them, gathering energy from the star below them. Not sure how they pulled that off, but in fairness I don't think the Geomancers know either.

[Ransu]

It has bothered me too everytime i read it. A star is not a planet but a sun, the source of heat and light. The stars we see in the sky arent planets at all, its impossible to see them with the naked eye or even the best telescope directly. Its their suns we see.
Please SE stop using this gross mistake.

FFXIV uses old English and bases their phrasing on a lot of old languages. The term planet came from the Greek word planetes which means wanderer. Planets were viewed the same as stars in early times.

[Iscah]

I think it may have been only the Sharlayans who started calling the planet Hydaelyn anyway, possibly only after they became aware of the "will of the star" and learned her name. So in that case, they've just changed the term they invented in the first place and it's no big deal to switch over to a new one.

[Ransu]

Aldernard is Africa. The entirety of FFXIV's world is straight up based off of Earth but stretched out.

[Lyth]

I think that there's a lore reason why so much of the Etheirys is ocean (great maps, by the way).

There's a 2018 FanFest interview with Gamer Escape which delves into this, and it's also covered in the EE volume 1. In short, the Fifth Umbral Calamity (of Ice) causes an ice age of sorts where various peoples (Miqo'te, Lalafell) migrate across the now frozen oceans to get to congregate in aether-rich regions where they can actually grow crops, Eorzea being one such place. Magic flourishes as a means of combating the cold, but eventually leads to the War of the Magi, which causes the Sixth Umbral Calamity (of Water). This causes everyone to seek out the high ground to escape the resultant great Flood. I'm sure that if you looked at a map of Etheirys at various timepoints during this, you'd see varying amounts of landmass. It may be that there's just less landmass now because the flood waters never completely receded.

What makes this really interesting is the First, where Norvrandt is functionally just a map of Eorzea with everything else erased by the Flood of Light ('the Empty'). Lakeland is Mor Dhona, Eulmore is Limsa, Rak'tika is the Shroud, Amh Araeng is Thanalan, Il Mheg is Coerthas, and Bismark likes to sleep in the Aether rich waters of 'the Source' much like Midgardsormr does in Lake Silvertear. To extrapolate from this, it's possible that the other shards are 'mirror images' of Etheirys from 12000 years ago, with variations in geography arising from their own unique history.

As a simple case in point, what if on one such shard, Meracydia and Ilsabard retained its land bridge simply because it had never experienced a great Flood? If so, you could conceivably shard hop, cross the land bridge, hop back, and find yourself on a different continent.