Names
The other day I remarked how it was incredibly stupid in my opinion that we don’t call Rome or Vienna by the names which the locals know them as. If you were looking for Vienna the signs that read Wien would likely escape your notice and your quest would be without end. Roma being Rome is easy enough to deduce but it’s still inexcusable to disrespect and disregard their identity so.
Names can be anything, spelled any way and pronounced completely differently. It’s one area in which independent spelling and pronunciation rules don’t apply. If Prince can be a symbol why can’t we respect the self-identification of these cities?
In fact much of Italy was once comprised of city-states so you could almost call it national identity in Rome’s case. Yea, there’s also the Vatican but I’m not going to get into the whole ball of wax except to use it to bump the number of countries I’ve visited up by one (currently at 10: Canada, US, Holland, Germany, Czech Republic, Austria, Italy, Vatican, France, and saving the best for last, UK).
Hey, it’s not like they’re using non-greco-roman (insert irony here) characters. If this were Korean, Japanese, Chinese, or even Russian you might have a case but not here.
And these cities are far older than, you know, North America; so who are we not to call these places by the correct names? They have seniority!
I’m also not touching the religious aspect of God telling man to give names to everything in creation, it’s a moot point anyways since man already gave these places names, we’re just getting it wrong.
And this whole thing feeds into the stereotype of stupid North Americans (mostly Americans) knowing nothing about and generally disrespecting Europe.
I launched into a pretty decent rant on this subject the other day when my significant other of German descent felt the need to point out that it was my people, the English, who renamed these places.
Well, alright then.
That makes it okay.
What? We beat them. It was the British EMPIRE, after all. Ruled most of the known world for awhile. To the victor the spoils, we chose naming rights.
I suppose using that logic the Germans could have ‘reinterpreted’ names of places in France and Poland for example. Oh well, too late now. Missed your chance. Might let you have another go at France though, they could use some straightening out.
Besides, to paraphrase Gul Dukat, the English don’t make mistakes.
Well, except for Tony Blair’s friendship with Bush and Robby Williams’ career. Call those a mulligan and a footnote.
