Dr. Forbush Thinks

When I was young and naïve I believed that places had names and everyone called those places by those names. After all, why would anyone call New York anything but New York? That was before I knew that in Spanish New York is known as Nueva York. Ok, fine one could translate the English word “new” to the Spanish equivalent “nueva,” but what’s the point of that? Why would anyone care to change the name of a place?

When one tours the world, however, one soon discovers that it’s the rule not the exception that different places have different names in different languages. Sometimes this makes sense, especially when the names are difficult to pronounce in some languages. But, America is filled with places named with complex Indian names. Cuyahoga, Chattahoochee, Appalachia, Yahoola, Hiawassee, Woonsocket, Dakota, Ouachita, and many many more native American names have stuck to places that we know. So, why is it that some languages have found it important to create a new name to call something that already has a good name given by the people who live near the places in question?

I assume that this has to do with culture. For example, when my grandfather came to this country his name was Enrico. This is the Italian name for the English name Henry. I never asked him, so I don’t know for sure, but I assume that he changed his name to Harry in an effort to blend into the American culture. Not all immigrants do this; for example Enrico Fermi kept his name the same.

But, for the names of places I am still confused. If the Italians had been calling Venice Venizia for hundreds of years before English was even a language, why would they start calling this place Venice? Maybe it has to do with the lack of foreign language skills. Maybe it has to do with laziness, or a lack of common spelling. In fact, I saw an interesting example of this kind of confusion when I was in Jamaca. The name of the town Ocho Rios, literally translated from the Spanish, means "Eight Rivers" but there is actually only one river by that town. Today people believe that it could be a corruption of Las Chorreras — the waterfalls, because waterfalls are perhaps the most striking feature of the area. But this is an interesting confusion of foreigners that came to a town and thought they understood enough Spanish to understand what the town was called, and being completely wrong. If Spanish travelers and English travels had visited this place equally there could have been two different names for this place that would have both been Spanish. Ocho Rios would be the name in English and Las Chorreras would be the name in Spanish. What a strange world we live in that people couldn’t clear up this confusion.

So, this brings me to today and the opening of the Winter Olympics in Torino or Turin Italia or Italy. There seems to be some confusion about this. NBC is the American TV network that is broadcasting the Winter Olympics this year, and they have decided to call the place Torino, Italy. They are using the Italian name for the city and the English name for the country. This doesn’t seem to be consistent, but from my point of view it actually makes a bit of sense in trying to reconcile the divide among our languages. After all, why should a place have more than one name? Why can’t we just learn the names that the native speakers call a place? It seems like NBC is taking one step in the direction of progress.

On the other hand, will they rename the “Shroud of Turin” to the “Shroud of Torino?”






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International Relations