Re: Renaming "traditional" names


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Posted by Robert Dilley on March 15, 2005 at 19:38:04 from 65.39.13.235 user rdilley.

In Reply to: Renaming posted by Eric Abraham on March 15, 2005 at 15:14:28:

It seems to me that there is a whole spectrum of possible reactions to place-name changes.

At one end is the abandonment of colonial names foisted on a colonised peoples -- often celebrating major figures among the colonising culture. It is difficult to object when the country gets rid of its alien rulers and wants to get rid of their imposed names at the same time. So, personally, I have no objections to Leopoldville becoming Kinshasa or Lourenco [don't know how to do cedillas on TarBoard] Marques becoming Maputo.

Likewise, when a name is changed by an oppressive regime to promote the leaders of the oppressors: I see no reason to insist on retaining say, Leningrad or Karl-Marx-Stadt over a return to St Petersburg and Chemnitz. Likewise, I sympathise with South Africans wanting to rename their capital, currently commemmorating the Boer leader Andries Pretorius, to the local and less-loaded name Tshwane (though I understand this name will apply to the whole metro area only, and that the city proper of Pretoria will retain its name). Suppose the Germans had won WWII, occupied the UK, and renamed London "Adolfburg". Wouldn't the name have gone ASAP once we Canadians regrouped and came and liberated you?

At the other extreme are countries who insist on everyone using their spelling of their country or capital. Why do we let the Chinese tell us we have to write "Beijing" for the long-accepted "Peking"? (Interestingly, their main university is still Peking University!) Poles don't seem to mind us writing "Warsaw" instead of "Warszawa" and I have a correspondent in Prague (met through TARS) who gets my letters, even though I don't address them to "Praha". When I lived in the UK, letters from France sent to me in "Londres, Grande-Bretagne" got through quite nicely.

Then there's a whole lot of stuff inbetween that I haven't time to go into. Renaming places in regional languages (I don't mind the Welsh writing Caerdydd as long as the rest of us can go on with Cardiff; making up names for newly-amalgamated cities (I'm living in one now: "Thunder Bay" appeared on 1 January 1970 with the joining of Port Arthur and Fort William). It's all very complicated, and I don't think one can be always for place-name changes, and one certainly can't be always against.

To drag this lecture back to AR, note that the Swallows and Amazons had their own names for places which they used amongst themselves (and expected their friendliest natives to understand) but were quite happy to let everyone else go on using their version of the names.

Hope you were paying attention. There's going to be a quick quiz at the end of the session.



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