The Naming of Names

British Society for Middle Eastern Studies

The Naming of NamesAuthor(s): Geoffrey LewisSource: Bulletin (British Society for Middle Eastern Studies), Vol. 11, No. 2 (1984), pp. 121-124Published by: Taylor & Francis, Ltd.Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/194914 .

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THE NAMING OF NAMES

Geoffrey Lewis

This article is the substantive part of the writer's Presidential Address at the BRISMES Annual Conference, 1983 (Ed.).

We, who must be free or die that speak the tongue that Shakspeare spake, tend to smile at the French with their Academy to regulate their choice of vocabulary (never mind how few of them take any notice of its rulings). We have nothing comparable in this

country. The British Academy, which might prima facie be

supposed to have a similar function, has other things to do. Instances of interference with the English language by public bodies are rare; the only one that leaps to mind is the British Standards Institution's policy of encouraging the use of 'flammable' in place of inflammable' to avoid ambiguity, though the French, with more confidence in their own literacy, still

manage with 'inflammable', and one does not hear of accidents

resulting from this! Nobody outside the British Standards Institution really takes the first syllable of 'inflammable' for a negative, and there is no immediate danger that our motorists will be subjected to toxication tests or that anyone will imagine that a professor's inaugural lecture is delivered when he vacates his chair. And yet there are several components of our language which have been changed at a stroke of the pen, and a foreign pen at that.

When new nations are born, they may reasonably wish to give their lands a new name. The territories of Bophuthatswana seem to have had no name at all before the Republic of Bophuthatswana was proclaimed in December 1977. When East Pakistan split away from West Pakistan it had to choose a new name for itself.

'Bengal' would not do, because West Bengal was the name of a State in neighbouring India, so it became Bangladesh. Fair enough. It is understandable, too, why the Belgian Congo had to become

Zaire, or at least why it could not remain the Belgian Congo, and why the new rulers of Northern and Southern Rhodesia should call their countries Zambia and Zimbabwe respectively. Remember the Gilbert and Ellice Islands? The two groups separated in 1975 and the Gilberts became independent on 12 June 1979 as

Kiribati, pronounced Kiribass, this being the local pronunciation of 'Gilberts'. And good luck to them!

But what can be said for 'Sri Lanka' and 'Kampuchea'? Well, this much can be said: the governments of Ceylon and Cambodia are entitled to call their countries whatever they like, and it is not their fault if we are pusillanimous enough to abandon the custom of centuries and follow their lead. The governments and peoples of Masr, Suomi and Bharat don't seem to mind if we call them Egypt, .Finland and India. Even Albania, not the cosiest of the family of nations, doesn't expect us to call it

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Shqipni. In 1930, the Turkish Post Office requested that letters addressed to certain cities should bear-their Turkish names: not

Angora, Constantinople, Smyrna, Adrianople, but Ankara, Istanbul, Izmir, Edirne. Two years later it announced that letters bearing the old names would no longer be delivered. Yet even in that time of intense national feeling, the Turks never asked the outside world to drop 'Turkey', 'Turquie', Ttrkei' and so on in favour of 'Ttirkiye'. One wonders what pressure Ceylon and Cambodia could have brought to bear on the British media to make them abandon the old names. Does the fault perhaps lie with

cartographers who want to make all our atlases obsolete every few years?

Once upon a time there was a country called Persia. The name came to us from the Romans, who took it from 'Persis', adapted by the Greeks from the native name of one province of the country. As it has been used in Western languages for well over two millennia, one would have thought that Westerners could not be denied the right to go on using it, not even by a commander of the Persian royal bodyguard turned Shah. But Riza Shah did

deny this right, because among the many bees in his bonnet was that people abroad, as well as his own subjects, ought to use the native name, Iran. The English-speaking world at that period was commendably slow to comply. During the Second World War, the Services doggedly went on talking about 'Persia', and there was an amiable Oxford librarian who until the early fifties

indiscriminately shelved together all books whose titles included the words 'Iran' or 'Iraq'. Users of his library supposed that he believed them to be the same place, and this was confirmed when one reader took the, matter up with him. He cheerfully admitted that he had never heard of a country called 'Iran' and assumed that the word was a dialect variant of the familiar

'Iraq'!

When Riza Shah's son and successor visited London in 1954, Winston Churchill insisted that he be described, on the invitations to a reception in his honour, as 'The Shah of Persia'. It may be that only Churchill could have got away with it but, to be

unfashionably fair to the late Shah, he was not so obsessed with 'Iran' as his father had been, or as some of his own servants were. I think it was in 1972 that the Persian Ambassador in London complained to the Foreign Office about a country pub he had noticed, called 'The Shah of Persia'; would they see to it that the name was changed to 'The Shah of Iran'? I do not know whether he took the Foreign Office's advice, which was to address his complaint to the landlord. There were giants even in such recent days.

Keesing's Contemporary Archives at one time actually reversed the tide. Its index, which had for many years used the heading 'IRAN (Persia)', in 1958 switched to 'PERSIA', with a cross- reference from 'Iran', maintaining this practice until 1971, when the main heading became 'IRAN', with a cross-reference from 'Persia'.

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The cross-reference disappeared in 1975, leaving the field to 'IRAN' alone, though 'PERSIAN GULF' still appears as a main

heading.

'Iranian', pronounced with the vowels of 'hydrangea', which most broadcasters use, under the impression that it is the 'with-it' English for the adjective 'Persian', is in fact on the

way out. The really 'with-it' radio commentators, especially those on the Voice of America, now give the first three syllables the vowels of 'Killarney'. Well, I suppose there is no way of stopping them, and no doubt those of us who go on talking about Persia rather than Iran seem, to those of the Iranian

persuasion, as archaic as those who follow Peter Simple in

talking about German East Africa (in some cases, I suspect,

because of an awareness that 'Tanganyika' is obsolete, coupled

with an uncertainty about how to pronounce 'Tanzania').

But it may still not be too late to put an end to the

grotesque affectation of applying the name 'Farsi' to the language which for more than five hundred years has been known to

English-speakers as Persian. It was cheering to learn that in

May 1980 the Managing Editor of The Washington Post sent a memo

to all desks, saying, "In the future, let's use the word 'Persian' when we mean the language, and not 'Farsi'." The best information

about how this nonsense started-- and let me assure any of my academic colleagues who read these lines that I have gone to the

fountain-head -- is that it was the work of certain half-baked British visitors to Persia during the Second World War. They talked about 'Farsi' mainly to show off, but also in the mistaken belief that it would endear them to their Persian hosts. I asked

my distinguished informant why they did so, when even the most

half-baked students of German don't go round saying they're studying Deutsch. The tart reply was, 'Perhaps it's because students of oriental languages tend to be more half-baked than others'. I do not in fact think this is true of students of

Arabic or Chinese, who do not normally use the native names of

these languages when speaking English. If they did, indeed, they would run the risk of having it thought that these were the

only Arabic or Chinese words they had so far mastered.

Let us be charitable, hard though it is when dealing with the Farsi-merchants. Some of them probably use the term because

they feel uncomfortable with the seemingly fuddy-duddy 'Persian' and are deterred by some spark of good sense from calling the

language of Persia 'Iranian'. For that is a family name which

covers many other languages besides Persian, including such

delightful tongues as Talysh and Tat, Tajika, Yaghnobi and Zaza.

Well, and what is to be done? About 'Iran', not much, I

fear, unless the present rulers of that ill-starred land give the word such a bad name that their successors beg us all to

forget it. About 'Sri Lanka' and 'Kampuchea', perhaps other

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newspapers might be induced to alter their editorial policy, as The Washington Post nobly did about 'Farsi'. Private citizens can strike a blow for the right by refusing to be cowed and

adhering or reverting to the time-honoured English names. To give them heart for the struggle, havinq begun with an allusion to Wordsworth, I shall end with a line from one of the moderns: 'Let the damned ride their earwigs to hell, but let me not join them'.

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The Naming of Names

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