Place Names (and Coughing up Fur Balls)

I'm off on Friday morning to Munich, Prague and Cracow, so it's time for a quick blog before my trip.

Yes, I'm going to Cracow: not to Krakow, as my EasyJet ticket would have me believe.  The thing is, you see, this is the spelling of the town in English.  It's Cracowie in French, it's Krakau in German, it's Kraków in Polish - and as far as I'm aware it's "Krakow" only in the language known as EasyJet.

Ever wondered why we have multiple spellings of place names in different languages?  Well it's very simple.  In years gone by merchants or other travellers would visit and find it difficult to pronounce the local variant of the place name.  If the place was significant enough different spellings or versions would occur in different languages.  Cities like Brussels literally have dozens of variants, it being on an international cross-road. 

Kraków (the Polish spelling) is pronounced with a cross between an "u" and an "ooh" like sound in the last vowel because of the accent.  It's a bit like "ooh err missus".  It became easier for English visitors and those talking about the place to adopt their own spelling and pronunciation.   It's pretty hard for an English person to pronounce the German "ü" properly, or indeed to do the German "ch" (just listen to Classic FM presenters trying to say "Bach").  Therefore München becomes Munich in English.  The Italians call it "Monaco" incidentally.  One Monaco does Bier, the other Monaco does Casinos.
 

Brunswick, Germany: how lovely

There is absolutely nothing wrong with this, and actually quite a lot right with it. These different place names and spellings are usually hundreds of years old.  There's such a charm for me to see something like the above.  English people really genuinely cannot pronounce Braunschweig properly: stick to "Brunswick" and we don't have a problem.  Remember the opening to Browning's wonderful poem?  "Hamelin Town's in Brunswick, by famous Hanover city" - not "Hameln Town's in Braunschweig, by famous Hannover city".  Shame "Brunswick" has virtually vanished from any map or atlas nowadays.

I love reading Koblenz as "Coblentz" (used right up to World War 2) - it gets the "tz" sound of the German "z" across. "C" is a much more used letter in English than K is.  On my Becherovka bottle it says "Original since 1807: Carlsbad, Czech Republic".  I can't pronounce the Czech version Karlovy Vary half as well, nor its neighbouring spa town.  The historic English use of "Marienbad" works a lot better for me, ta, and probably for you too if you don't know your way round Czech's 42 letters and how to pronounce them.  These old fashioned names or spellings seem somehow romantic to me: they conjure up a past that has vanished.

No, I can't even try it either

A Dying Thing

So why is this type of usage dying out?  Well for some cities it's not.  The big ones are still Florence (Firenze), Cologne (Köln), Warsaw (Warszava), Lisbon (Lisboa) etc in English, rather than the local version.  We have an inevitable dumbing down and standardisation going on for the smaller places though.  The UN, quite surprisingly to me, actually has a 50 year old body called UNGEGN (United Nations Group of Experts on Geographical Names) which meets every now and then to discuss standardising place names.  Last time they met in Vienna, which henceforth presumably may only be referred to as "Wien".  (Never mind, by the way, this is pronounced Vee-en with in the local dialect, but Veen (i.e with a dipthong) by other Austrians).  It's a fruitless, impossible, needless task.

Place names can of course be political statements.  Ayers Rock is no longer considered acceptable by many Australians, whereas Uluru is.  This is a sacred place with special meaning for Aboriginals and Ayers Rock has strong colonial undertones.  The Poles call Dantzig (yes, the old English name!) Gdansk.  The Germans call it Danzig.  The use of one variant can definitely be used as a tool to imply ownership and it's not hard to think of examples when this was the case.

Nazi Propaganda from the 1930s

Interestingly, the incredibly politically correct (in this respect) and anxious Germans have not today sought to impose local Polish and Czech name usage on their former towns.  You still see "Posen", "Danzig" and "Breslau" flashing up in German airports on arrival boards.  Just as Britain is not laying claim to the capital of Italy by calling it Rome, rather than Roma, I quite agree with this.  These are simply the German names and their usage should imply nothing more than that.  This is not 1939 and there is no politics behind it.

English usage in this respect is a little different and more nuanced.  Breslau, for example, is the name you will find in history books for the Silesian town right up until 1945; Wrocław refers only and specifically to the post-1945 town with its new Polish population. 

Kate Adie Coughing up Fur Balls

So then finally we come to Kate Adie.  Bless her: she's an amazing, outstanding journalist.  She's been everywhere.  And she STILL effing well insists on calling Bahrain Bar-chhhhhhh-rain.  It literally sounds like she's gagging on a fur ball.  No Katie, it's "bar-rain" in English.  We don't say "Par-eeee" with a nice rolled French R do we?  We say "Paris" when we're speaking our own language.  She did it on Radio 4 recently and as great as she is, this strikes me as the most silly, pretentious, and actually wrong use of language.

Kate Adie on BBC Radio 4, 12 February 2012

When a Place Name Change *might* be a Good Idea

Okay, so we've established that I'm off to Munich, Prague and Cracow.  As long as I'm speaking English, I'm not off to München, Praha and Kraków.  

Whilst I'm in Munich, I may pop over the border into Austria.  There's a charming little village of 104 people there in the middle of the countryside, not too far from Salzburg.  It has a very old place name.  Here's a photo I took of my pal Jörg there on a previous visit.  Click on this link if you want a real giggle about something which actually has absolutely nothing to do with this blog entry at all.  I just wanted to share it :-)