[WikiEN-l] English names

Wed Jan 21 16:33:03 UTC 2004

Wik raised an interesting point in an edit summary re: [[Gdansk]]:

> there never has been any English name for this city, 
> so the local name is used, which since 1945 is Gdansk

On one level, I think he's right, but I think he's 
drawing the wrong conclusion. Bear with me here...

Does Michael Jackson have a Russian name? I don't think 
so; he's an American pop artist. He's not "Mikhail 
Jakovitch" or any such thing. Even if some Russians 
decided to translate his name into their language, that 
wouldn't mean it was his real name.

Gdansk doesn't "have an English name". It has an 
official Polish name, and it has also had a German 
name.

On the other hand, English speakers and map-makers and 
geography teachers have /applied/ English names to 
countless places. We used to call the capital of 
mainland China "Pekin" or "Peking", but around 10 or 20 
years ago there was a big re-shuffle and we adopted a 
closer transliteration: "Beijing".

The capital of the USSR (and still capital of Russia) 
is Moskva (or Moscow, I forget which). We're an 
English-language encyclopedia, we have to call places 
/something/. Moscow doesn't have an English name per 
se; it's a Russian city with a Russian name. But 
English-speaking people have been referring to it with 
the /English word/ 'Moscow'.

Now, whether its Oder River or Odra River, Gdansk or 
Danzig, we English speakers /give/ English names to 
everything. We have to, if we are to speak of them at 
all.

This doesn't mean we are changing its name or endorsing 
some version of its name. One of the first thing any 
English speaker does when learning a foreign language 
is to find out the native names for the countries which 
speak that language. No one in Japan calls it "Japan"; 
it's Nihon or Nippon, without any hint of a "J" sound. 
French call it "Japon", but that doesn't mean Japan has 
a French name. It just means that French speakers use 
the word /Japon/ to refer to it. Its real name is not 
disturbed or altered by what foreigners call it.

I hope this provides a basis for ending the year-long 
battle over Gdansk and Odra/Oder.

Ed Poor, aka Unsolved Equation