“What’s in a name? That which we call a rose, by any other name, would smell as sweet”said Shakespeare through the lips of an enthralled Juliet. Although the meaning of this phrase in literary context relates to the fact that their love would remain the same regardless of the family name attached to her beloved Romeo, this insight highlights an inherent human need with regard to the environment to which they relate. As a group of speakers, we choose a term to designate tangible realities and abstract concepts, in order to be able to refer to them when communicating. As explained from a linguistic point of view, the vast majority of words we use are conventions, that is, at some point we decided as speakers that this would be the word we would use to name a referent. As we evolved, we utilized those words to create new words and be able to mention new realities, using processes such as derivation or composition. However, the words we use are also related to feelings and our own personal history as speakers, Otherwise, every memeber of a speaker community would use the same expressions. This means that many words hold a symbolic value for us, not only representing an objective reality, but rather the relationship between the speakers and the term. Of course, proper nouns are typically more prone to this quality than common nouns, with notable exceptions concerning affectionate nicknames and community words associated with certain sentiment. For some reason, ‘bread’ is ‘bread’ and ‘wine’ is ‘wine’, but the Northern Irish village of Achadh Lon (“blackbird field”) could not keep its name in the face of the interventionist English, who renamed it Brookeborough (‘Brooke family burgh’). And, on those occasions in which an Irish original name was kept, it was phonetically adapted and made into the official designation. Brookeborough did not just represent a phonetic “proposal” that was suited for English ears, but rather was an unequivocal proof of who was at the helm at the time.
For this reason, throughout history, nations have required the incorporation into their respective languages of the place names from other lands to which they were related. During this process, one could choose to adapt the name phonetically, to give it a brand new name in the target language based on some historical reason or, sadly, to impose a new name in the target language and in the language of origin, as in the case of war conquests. As a result, there are country names in a given language that have nothing to do with the name of the same country in the original language. Therefore, today’s article is going to deal with country names in Spanish that are different from their respective local names.
For starters, we can use the example of Germany (Alemania in Spanish), which bears no relation to the original local name: Deutschland. This name in the original language comes from the term diutisciu land, where diutisc means “people” or “popular”, so that etymologically, Deutschland means “land of the people”. On the other hand, Germany is a name that refers to the tribe of the alamans, a group of people that at some point occupied almost half of the actual national territory. Etymologically, it seems that it stems from all (everything) and Mann (man), meaning “the universal, those in the whole), as it was a tribe formed by several peoples. Moreover, in English we use Germany, which was a name penned by the Romans in reference to the Germani people, which were dwellers of the Rhine river east bank. Likewise, in East Europe they are known as Nemecko, Niemcy or Nimtsätä, a root related to the Russian немой [niemój], which means “mute, who does not speak” in allusion to the fact that they were not able to speak the same local language, in other words, they were foreigners.
Another interesting case is that of China, which is called 中国 [zhōngguó] or “central nation” in the local language. This implies that the Chinese population that named their territory at the time used to think of themselves as the center of the world, quite an understandable idea when we consider our historic past and our relationship with the universe just a few centuries ago. The name of China, which is internationally used, comes from the Qing or Ching dynasty, a word that Marco Polo imported to Europe. He is also the creator of the name Manchuria, which he called Catay at the time, in close reference to the Khitan people, a Mongolian tribe that lived in the region. Nowadays, Китай [kitáj] is the Russian name for China.
Other striking cases are the name for Finland, which is called Suomi by the locals, a term that is considered to relate to the word suo (“swamp”) as it is one of the typical landscapes across the region. Spanish names Finland after the Finn tribe, a group of nomadic hunter-gatherers. Greece is possibly named after a tribe that migrated from the region of present-day Italy to present-day Greece, but the truth is that in Greek it is called Ελλάδα [Ellada], which reads Hellas in English, alluding to the belief that the Hellenistic people (the Greeks) are the descendence from Hellen, son of Deucalion and Pyrrha. Finally, we can mention the name of India, which gets its name due to the Indo river, but which is called Bharat in its original language, Hindi, on account of a legendary king.
Every country chooses their name to highlight an important time in their history or that reflects a characteristic that it wants to put forward before other nations. This phenomenon affects many other countries, which we may revisit in the future and also other types of proper nouns, which comes to show that, at the very least, a name contains the feeling of those who utter that word.
Image reference: https://www.pinterest.es/pin/pin-en-maps–151715081180909825/
