I’ve always liked words; I like to play with the fine shadings in meaning which come from dealing with the connotations as well as the denotations of words. With this in mind I have a few questions to ask… Would you be a different person if you had a different name? I imagine most people would give a tentative yes to this question, yes in the sense that they would be a little different. Maybe a rose is a rose is a rose…
My last name has been mispronounced to me so spectacularly over the years that I wonder if having what are in effect multiple names can also change you… I’ve had my last name pronounced as if I were from Finland, Germany, Ireland, and some less effective word scrambles with I still don’t understand.
This takes me to my question for today. If a group of people call themselves something, why shouldn’t use their label? The same thing gores for place names. What is the real utility in calling a city Rome, if it actually called Roma by its denizens? The same goes for the Munich/Munchen, or Moscow/Moskva, Warsaw, Warszawa dichotomies, and this is only when applying English titles to these places. The fact is, if you were to pick up a Dutch or Swedish Atlas you would have to deal with these same place names rendered into some equivalently ‘hatched’ moniker in (respectively) Dutch or Swedish.
This is not the same thing as transliteration, which would be rendering words into different alphabets. I am merely talking about rendering place names into something which would be much more uniform (using the same letter system…).
This idea and some of the subsequent questions came to me as a result of having read a post at Coming Anarchy.com. As a small digression, this site is a great ‘Realist’ world affairs and international relations website. The article was called: Ancient Empires, Modern States, and covers some interesting ‘trivia’ as to how we have some to some rather strange conventions for the names of some nations.
Take Egypt. The ancient Egyptian name of the country is Kemet, and the modern Arabic name of the country is Misr (or Masr), a word with Semitic origin. Egypt comes from the Latin Aegyptus, which in turn derives from the ancient Greek Aígyptos, which means “below the Aegean [Sea]”.
Then in the Caucasus, ethnic Georgians call themselves Kartvelebi, their land Sakartvelo, and their language Kartuli. Georgia comes from a belief that came back to Medieval Europe from the Crusades that the country is the home of St. George, a Roman Christian martyr. And in Armenia, the native name for the country is Hayk, which in the Middle Ages was extended to Hayastan, by addition of the Iranian suffix -stan (land). The name Armenia derives from Old Persian and Ancient Greek.
I can see that in relation to a post UI put up several months ago, that there are at least as many Geographical anomalies in place names as there are in the sites themselves…
