What’s in a name
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This mornings’ blog posts seems to be on the common theme of names. Turkey is considering using the Turkish spelling of it’s name, Turikye ( the u should have 2 dots above it). The rather narked president of the Ankara Chamber of Trade had to make his speech to the empty chair intended for the Turkish Tourism Minister, who was a no show at the meeting. This was after the date of the meeting had been changed to accommodate the Minister’s schedule. The change in name is desired because Turkey is also the name of a bird in English and can have rather negative connotations e.g. we might refer to a poor quality or useless product as a turkey. However if you look at photo, courtesy of Wikipedia, of the turkey below he is a beautiful bird.
I’ve always thought that country and city names should retain their given names. Greece is know as Ellas to the Greeks. Why do we call Firenza Florence? I think it leads to confusion and is unnecessary to change names. What do you think?
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March 1st, 2007 at 8:22 pm
I’m usually relatively solidly in the “keep its English name” camp for the major places in that they’ve been known that way for a considerable period of time and therefore in untold numbers of books, maps and whatnot. The other reason is that large chunks of names just can’t be written in English. We often consider just the European-style names, but I’d say that English speakers wouldn’t even be able to pronounce a large proportion of names of Chineses, African, Arabic, etc. origin.
Even for languages which have relatively European alphabets, it’s not a runner to change something like Turkey since, as you’ve seen, you can’t even type the Turkish version of the name on our keyboards. Even if you could, chances are that it wouldn’t display properly. There are still problems with the Euro symbol eg I can type it here as € but if anyone’s subscribing to your blog via e-mail it won’t be displayed properly.