I used to think that it really mattered whether or not I referred to Burma as Myanmar or Burma. No, really. I can remember when the change happened. The Economist suddenly started talking about Yangon and Myanmar out of the blue. Oh, the treachery, I thought. SLORC said Myanmar, so obviously all right-thinking people had to say Burma. Of course, at another time the British said Burma, so other right-thinking people would have insisted that something else be used.
Then you spend about ten minutes looking into the significance of the change in Burma and you realise that this is silly. Mranma/Myanma is one name that has been used to describe the country, and Bama is another. One is apparently a literary style, the other is used more often in colloquial speech. The traditional name of Burma evidently may or may not originally come from Bama, but is definitely held over from the British colonial designation for the place. Why a different name can’t be reflected in English usage is a bit of a mystery. Of course, it comes back to who made the change, rather than the substance of the change itself. The logic seems to be: we won’t give them the satisfaction of using the new name! That’ll teach ‘em a thing or two! Of course, the Burmese government doesn’t really care that much which name we use–it isn’t about us–and so our valiant defiance of the dictators is so much huffing and puffing over nothing.
All the time we use inapt names in English for countries that have never called themselves by that name (e.g., Armenia, Finland, Hungary, Greece), which has often puzzled me, since some of us get very annoyed with people who insist on calling us estadounidense and norteamericano. These are the established names, and so for convenience I understand why we don’t run around talking about Hayastan and Hellas, but it would be nice if we could admit that it is a matter of convenience (and, one might say, a certain laziness) to use the non-indigenous names of other countries. Strangely enough, we are more than happy to oblige foreign countries when other governments change their countries’ names (e.g., when Upper Volta became Burkina Faso, or Zaire became Congo yet again, or British Honduras became Belize). Perhaps it is high time that we fought back against Fasoan tyranny and returned to the ridiculous-sounding geographical designation that preceded the current name. Sometimes I will still say Zaire out of force of habit, but calling it Zaire for all those decades (which virtually everyone did) was, according to the logic of the anti-Myanmar crowd, a concession to Mobutu. Since Mobutu was on “our” side in the Cold War, Westerners, so far as I know, did not worry themselves about whether or not they were giving in to some supposed anti-colonialist blackmail by using the official name of the country.
Some people are upset by the official renaming of Bombay because Hindu nationalists were the ones who did it (I believe the old name is still frequently used out of habit), but it puzzles me why we shouldn’t, generally speaking, use the names for countries that the inhabitants themselves use or those that they say they would prefer. There is nothing necessarily wrong with continuing to use old names, especially when they are well-established and familiar (we will not start calling Egypt Misr nor will we begin styling India Bharat anytime soon, I think), but actively protesting against the official name of a country–when it has as much claim to being a “legitimate” name as its alternative–seems like an odd way to express opposition to a regime. It’s not as if the regime cares whether we use the new designation or not–the change is for domestic consumption anyway–and we are not lending aid and comfort to Burmese dictators if we happen to call it Myanmar.
For instance, Iran has been the official name of that country in foreign relations since the 1920s, but there are still some who will insist on calling it Persia, thinking that they are somehow sticking it to the Ayatollah. They are, if anything, sticking it to the ghost of Reza Khan and the Pahlavi rulers, which is pointless. That Iran is the older indigenous name for the place only underscores how irrelevant this posturing over names really is.
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September 25th, 2007 at 5:18 pm
johnsavage
I’d say we have to oppose the politically correct insistence on letting others tell us what to call them. You’re right to say that “actively protesting against the official name of a country–when it has as much claim to being a “legitimate” name as its alternative–seems like an odd way to express opposition to a regime,” of course. But we shouldn’t be annoyed at what foreigners call us, and we should call them what we like. It’s our language!
September 25th, 2007 at 5:48 pm
Daniel Larison
Of course, we can refer to them using the words already in our language. I’m not insisting that everyone has to use these indigenous names. I just find it strange how often we disregard these names. They can ignore them entirely, and I won’t mind a bit, and no one should feel obliged to use them. But to object to the renaming of one particular country because you dislike its government, while paying no mind to all the other examples where the names have been changed, sometimes by disreputable rulers, seems unnecessary and futile.
September 26th, 2007 at 11:40 am
A.K.B. Cusack
It seems to me that when there is an established common English-language name for a place it should be left alone.
Why did we shift to calling the capital of China Beijing when the French still get to call it ‘Pekin’?
The official name of a city in southern Vietnam is ‘Thành phố Hồ Chí Minh’, but I would argue that in the English language it should normally be called Saigon because that is the established custom (as with Armenia for Hayastan).
It gets trickier when you’re dealing with English-speaking countries, where names, while they may have origins in other languages (Latin, Dutch, Native American, etc), are, despite those potential origins, honorary members of the English language. If the city fathers of Detroit decided to rename that city ‘Michael Moore City’, would we be obliged to call it such? Even trickier for English-speaking countries like India which have more culturally significant other languages. But I suspect Bombay will always be Bombay, except in the realm of officialdom.
Anyhow, here are John Derbyshire’s thoughts:
http://www.olimu.com/Journalism/Texts/Commentary/Ethnonymy.htm
September 26th, 2007 at 12:22 pm
Daniel Larison
I take your points. For that matter, we don’t oblige the Chavistas by calling it the “Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela.” I am willing to grant the point about English-speakers using the established names in our language. Even so, if we’re not going to use the indigenous names, I would insist that everyone acknowledge that it is really a matter of using the established English names and not an expression of our resistance to a foreign government.
However, some of Derbyshire’s points about ethnic and tribal names seem less persuasive to me. For instance, someone may refer to Hungarians as Magyars, as well they might, and I don’t see why this should be seen as an imposition on the English-speaking listener. And if using Magyar makes sense, why not Roma? It seems to me to be a reasonable expectation that people should at least *know* the names that people use for themselves and should be able to recognise them, even if we do not routinely use them in our language. Maybe it’s a measure of how preciously multiculti my middle school was, but we learned to call the Bushmen “!Kung Bushmen,” as it is sometimes written, so there’s nothing that strange or absurd for me (except the exclamation point) about using such names.
September 26th, 2007 at 1:11 pm
Grumpy Old Man
You probably know this, but the “!” in “!kung” stands for a click consonant (in the particular case, I think a lateral click). These are found only in the San languages in southern Africa, and in a few Bantu languages, such as Xhosa, which have borrowed them.
English speakers who don’t have an interest in linguistics won’t ever adopt these sounds, any more than they will adopt Chinese or Vietnamese tones, or the Japanese will adopt Western consonant clusters (hence “Sutarin” for “Stalin” etc.). For that matter, we won’t be saying “Paris” with a uvular “r” any time soon, either.
Thus, even if we try to cater to the ephemeral whims of nationalists, which we should do at least when the old names have pejorative import, we will at best come up with imperfect, Anglophone versions of their “correct” designations.