Names Mean Things

Dean Esmay notes folks critiquing his spelling of the Muslim holy book as Koran, when the current preferred spelling is Qur’an (or just plain Quran, if you want to be slightly simpler but less preferred).

That then provoked Dean to point to an interesting article by John Derbyshire on what the author calls “The Onomastic Cringe,” the push in the West to use (approximations of, sometimes vague ones) the “local” names for geography — countries, cities, etc. — and enthnonymy (what people call themselves). (The article gets a bit screwball in places, but it’s an interesting read nonetheless.)

So, for example, one doesn’t call them Gypsies any more, but Roma. It’s not Peking, it’s Beijing. Mt. McKinley becomes Denali. Burma is now Myanmar. And the Koran is the Qu’ran.

I wonder how much of this is a combination of post-colonial guilt and Third World muscle-flexing. Certainly there seems to be no widespread move among English-speakers to refer to Deutschland instead of Germany — nor are the Germans bugging us (or the French with their Allemagne) about it, either.

Maybe the Europeans are innured to it. After all, most cities in Europe have undergone a myriad of spelling changes (Danzig, Gdansk), depending on who owned them that decade, let alone wholesale name changes (St Petersburg, Petrograd, Leningrad, and back to the beginning again).

That might explain why nobody in England cares that the Chinese show Oxford as Niujin on their maps.

One might wonder whether this trend will lead to the end of people criticizing citizens of the US from calling themselves Americans (to the chagrin, rumor has it, of folks in Canada and Mexico and elsewhere on the North and South American continents). After all, if that’s what we call ourselves, that trumps other claims, right?

Well, probably not.

I’m of mixed minds on this (as with so much else). On the one hand, yeah, I feel the need to respect the language and self-identification of others.

On the other hand, chaos pretty quickly can ensue from this, especially when ownership of a name or locale or people comes into dispute, particularly over historical periods. Is it Yerushalayim or Al-Quds — or do we respect several centuries of our own language and just call it Jerusalem, torquing everyone off?

Or, to quote an earlier post of mine on the subject, whose claims do we respect for Mt. Everest’s “real” name? The Tibetan name Qomolangma. as proposed by Tibetan scholars working in Beijing? Or maybe Chomolungma, as other Tibetans call it? Or Sagarmatha. as it is named by the Nepalese?

Maybe we should just give it a lat-long coordinate and leave it at that. Or return to its pre-surveying days of “Peak 15.”

How do you spell Moammar Gaddafi’s name, anyway? Has anyone asked him? Does that matter?

Anyway, I’m not sure it’s a debate that lends itself to a straightforward answer, being tied to history, politics, religion, and emotion — not to mention orthographies and alphabets that don’t match our own. I’ve referred to the Muslim holy book hereabouts as the Qur’an for quite some time.

But, then, I think it’s cool being pedantic, so don’t pay me any attention.

(with a nod toward Adam for the title)