The Onomastic Cringe
DERBYSHIRE, JOHN
The Onomastic Cringe Whatever happened to good old-fashioned Anglo-Saxon place names? BY JOHN DERBYSHIRE THE INDISPENSABLE Michael Kelly in a recent column deplores the silence of the U.S....
...Ethnonymy—the naming of peoples—is apparently headed down the same slippery slope that toponymy— the naming of places—embarked on 20 years ago, when we were all supposed to start saying "Beijing" and "Mumbai" instead of Peking and Bombay, out of imagined deference to the sensibilities of the Third World...
...Was this journey really necessary...
...Here are some of those other considerations: ¶ EDUCATION: Teachers can't get even the brute facts of geography, history, and ethnology into kids' heads when the names keep changing...
...or, when that involves some alphabet different from ours, in a transcription as phonetically faithful as possible...
...So why confuse us like this...
...Come and get me, you bastards...
...I certainly share Kelly's indignation...
...He reads of action going on in places called canton, Swatow, and Amoy...
...Peking" is a fair approximation of the way most southern Chinese pronounce the name of their capital...
...Imagine a bright tenth-grader who wants to do a project on the Opium Wars...
...FAIRNESS: The need to call peoples and places by their local names is entirely a figment of the AngloSaxon liberal imagination—yet another aspect of the absurd cultural cringing our civilization has gone in for this past 30 years...
...I pulled down my Times Atlas of the World and got the answer: Iskenderun körfezi...
...So I went to the attic and looked the place up in my grandfather's 1922 atlas...
...government in the face of a massive ethnic cleansing currently under way in Kosovo, this time "conducted by the Albanians against their ethnic Serb, Croatian, Roma and Muslim Slavic neighbors...
...The trouble is, this doesn't work...
...The Roma are the Gypsies...
...A scholarly e-group I belong to recently featured some email exchanges about a people called the Saami...
...This very sensible principle has been replaced by a new one: Foreign names must be rendered in their native orthography...
...I hereby christen the whole phenomenon under discussion "The Onomastic Cringe...
...Meanwhile, down in Africa, Hottentots are "Khoi" while Bushmen must be called "San...
...English-speakers voice the "b," which should be unvoiced...
...Gypsies...
...What will now become of my party piece, reciting the silliest word in the German language: Hottentotenpotentatenstantenattentater John Derbyshire is a critic and novelist living in Huntington, New York...
...Why are we thus distracting him from his historical researches...
...So the net result of all this upheaval is that a familiar Anglicization of a foreign name has been replaced by another Anglicization, no closer than the first...
...Granted, it is a courtesy to refer to peoples and their places by the names they themselves use...
...Toponymical practice has now passed far beyond the bounds of reason into a realm of utter lunacy...
...The Swedish city-name Göteborg, for example, contains two sounds— one vowel, one consonant—that English-speakers cannot produce without special training...
...Lapps...
...This one I didn't know and had to ask about: "Saami" is the new, PC-certified name of the Lapps...
...He finds a good library with lots of excellent books on the topic, some of them published decades ago (e.g...
...Gulf of Alexandretta...
...Beijing" is a shot at the official— under the current regime—northern pronunciation, but it really gets us no closer...
...but—excuse me—who the heck are the Roma...
...But why is this consideration supposed to override all others...
...PHONETICS: The customary practice until recently was this: If a foreign name comes to the attention of English-speakers, we are entitled to Anglicize it for our convenience...
...The other day I needed to know the name of that wee gulf up in the top righthand corner of the Mediterranean...
...How many other people know this, i cannot guess, but i feel sure it is not many...
...Who, exactly, is better off for our calling Gypsies "Roma" and Jerusalem "Yerushalayim/Al-Quds...
...But where are those places...
...Now, I am sure that somewhere in there was the Turkish word for "gulf," but, alas, I had mislaid my Turkish dictionary...
...There is a lot of this going on...
...Hottentots...
...And I have no doubt the Hottentots still call my own people what they have always called them—probably "white devils...
...but of course he doesn't know...
...To hell with them and all their works...
...Chinese atlases show England's great university city as Niujin, with no hint that we locals actually pronounce it "Oxford...
...No problem...
...Further east, the Samoyeds are now "Nemtsi...
...The question is rhetorical: Having been given the novels of George Borrow (Lavengro, Romany Rye) to read at an early age, i happen to know that rom means "man" in the Gypsy language...
...and they Frenchify the "j" into zh, a sound that does not occur in Chinese...
...I could tell him, if he knew to ask me, that those cities are nowadays called Guangzhou, Shantou, and Xiamen...
...With wrong tones, Beijing means "background...
...Why not say "Gypsy...
...And when the new names are written in a way that nobody but a master of comparative graphetics can pronounce...
...He will not find them in any school atlas published since about 1980...
...The beneficiaries of this consideration, however, do not reciprocate...
...Peking...
...we'll call it Gothenburg...
...one who assails the aunt of a Hottentot potentate...
...Don't kids face enough distractions...
...Bombay...
...And of course nobody attempts the tones, a non-optional feature of Chinese pronunciation...
...Maurice col-lis's Foreign Mud, still—after 50 years—one of the best accounts of the Opium Wars...
...CUSSEDNESS: Damn whatever United Nations committee is foisting this gibberish on us...
Vol. 5 • January 2000 • No. 17
