The Globe, Politically Corrected

From today's Washington Post.

The Globe, Politically Corrected
by Geoffrey Wheatcroft

When the England cricket team last toured India, fans back home had an interesting choice. They could pick up one newspaper in the morning to read the report of a game played in Bombay, or another paper to read about a game played in Mumbai. It was the same game and the same town. The "gateway to the East," whose colors and scents Rudyard Kipling always remembered from his early childhood, was known to most of the world for centuries as Bombay but has now had its name politically corrected (as it were) to Mumbai.

Most Western newspapers have obediently followed suit, but then that has been the fashion of the age. For years, baffled readers have pored over the news from Sri Lanka only to realize that it was Ceylon, and then from Myanmar, only to work out that it was Burma. Before the name Myanmar was imposed on us by its repulsive junta, we changed the name of Cambodia to Democratic Kampuchea, to please the equally repulsive Khmer Rouge.

This continual tinkering with names is not only environmentally wasteful--think of all the road signs and textbooks that have to be altered. It's also tedious and illogical. Maybe it's time to call a halt.

In the case of Myanmar, Joseph Lelyveld, a former executive editor of the New York Times, justified his newspaper's decision to follow these governments' leads essentially in terms of good manners: "It is not our business what a country wants to call itself." Indeed it isn't, but is it that country's business what WE call it? I once wrote an article for Lelyveld's paper about the brilliant musical life of the country its citizens call Suomi, but that might have puzzled readers, so I called it Finland. And if Myanmar and Suomi, why not Deutschland and Hellas?

Meanwhile, there has been a separate tendency toward "geographical correctness," so that atlases more and more use local versions of names. Traditional English forms such as Rheims and Lyons are frowned upon and become Reims and Lyon. But this too is obviously inconsistent, otherwise we should be writing about "the 1938 München agreement" and "the 1957 Treaty of Roma."

Across Europe and elsewhere, the English formed our own way of saying and spelling names, which was more flattering than insulting -- and was, after all, reciprocated. An Italian or Frenchman should be no more displeased by my saying "Venice " or "Marseilles" than I am by him saying "Londra" or "Édimbourg." In fact, some of those older forms do survive in specific contexts. Are any feelings hurt if we wear clothes made of cashmere and angora (not Kashmir or Ankara), or keep leghorn chickens (not Livorno)?

To be sure, place names have often been fighting words. Some were changed for political reasons, over and again, so that a man could be born in St. Petersburg, grow up in Petrograd and live in Leningrad before dying in St. Petersburg, without leaving the same street. And sometimes they reek of bitter national conflict. Whether you called the self-same town Pressburg, Pozsony or Bratislava depended on what national statement you wanted to make, German, Hungarian or Slovak, and so it went with Smyrna/Izmir (Greek or Turkish) or Fiume/Rijeka (Italian or Croat). In the far northwest of Europe, they facetiously say "Stroke City," intending the oblique stroke in the middle of Londonderry/Derry, as Protestant Unionists and Catholic nationalists respectively call the town on Lough Foyle (though the latter really ought to say Doire, the authentic Gaelic form).

While all such political and communal passions are sad enough, the worst reason of all for changing names is what the great H.W. Fowler in "A Dictionary of Modern English Usage" condemned under the heading "Didacticism." For centuries, English-speakers called the Chinese capital Peking, until one day we were all told to say Beijing. This wasn't even to placate national sensitivities; it was to appease academic drudges who thought there was a "correct" spelling of Chinese, though how can there be one in a language written in ideograms?

All this incessant, restless change makes language harder to understand. British soldiers used to write acronymic endearments on the back of envelopes to wives or sweethearts: "Holland" was "Hope Our Love Lasts And Never Dies," and "Burma" was "Be Undressed Ready My Angel." What can Myanmar possibly stand for?

And spare us the grand lady-who-lunches ordering an extra portion of Mumbai duck for her Beijingese dog.

 

I didn't mean to imply that I agreed with this when I posted it. It's just an interesting commentary. Nonetheless...

Almost no language uses Germany's own name deutsch for its people. The Scandinavians call them tysk and the Italians call them tedesco. Everyone else calls them something like allemand, nemet or german. Likewise Hellas for Greece, Shqiperia for Albania, Magyarorszag for Hungary or Suomi for Finland. Everyone's name for Zhongguo is taken from the name of the Chin dynasty.

Some names are not pronounceable by others, which I suspect is the fate of Shqiperia. Some are simply phonetic evolutions of the same name in other languages: Latin Hispania became España in Spanish, Espagne in French and Spanien in German. Other names have a political problem. Deutsch is descended from Ancient Germanic thiudisc, the adjectival form of thiuda, which means "people." Zhongguo means "the central country." No foreigner is going to use words like that to refer to another people, whether friend or foe.

Have you heard the way we mangle the words cordon bleu? Have you even noticed that we changed chaise longue, literally "long chair" into "chaise lounge?" Do you know that chaise longue is itself a bastardization by the chic Parisians of their own chaire longue, fashionably mimicing the pronunciation of foreigners who couldn't pronounce the uvular northern French R?

In California we pronounce rodeo more or less correctly: ro-DAY-oh. The rest of the anglophone world calls it a ROH-deeyo. It's not easy to pronounce foreign words correctly. The communist government of China finally got the world to adopt the Pinyin transcription system so we'd stop calling their capital by its Cantonese name, Peking. But tens of millions of anglophones seem to think the J in Beijing is a French J, not an English J! It really is Beijing, my fellow Americans, not Beizhing!

"Bombay" was just some hapless foreigner's attempt to reproduce the sounds of the natives pronouncing Mumbai correctly.