AN AMERICAN VOICE IN MEXICO
WHAT’S IN A NAME?
One steamy afternoon a few years ago I
was riding through Cairo with a driver. Even though I drive all over México,
I’m not sure I would drive in that huge city. We were moving along at six cars
abreast on a four lane street. I had arrived the previous night, and although I
had visited once before, I kept peering out the window, trying to absorb as
many of the sights as I could. One theme kept recurring on the buildings lining
that broad street: there was the Misr Bank, Misr Ford, the Misr Pharmacy, and
many others.
I leaned over the passenger seat in
front and said to the driver, “Wow, that Misr family owns all kinds of things.
They must be about the richest family in town. Are they related to Hosni Mubarek?”
He was still in power at that time.
The driver laughed so hard he nearly
choked. I made a mental note not to startle him like that again in heavy
traffic. He turned his head toward me. “My friend, this country is called Misr.
Do you understand this?” I had never heard the word in my life, even though I
had spent a week in Cairo in 1975. I was happy that his English was flawless.
“Misr.” My voice must have become dull
and lifeless. “Where have I been? But wasn’t it always called Egypt?”
“Yes, by you. Not by anyone who lives
here. Sorry for that.”
So there it was. We in Europe and the
Americas had rebadged Misr into Egypt. Maybe in China and Japan they did that
too. But why? This made me think a bit about what other countries had been
renamed, and ask whether we ourselves had been through that in the United
States.
Of course, for those living in México,
the United States is called los Estados Unidos, or in France, les Etats-Unis, but
each is a simple translation of three words in common use: the, united, and
states. Nothing sinister there, I thought, since all three have meaning outside
the country name. But what happens when the country names are unique words, and
have no common usage? Do we need to change those too?
Look at Italy. That’s easy enough, but
that’s not the name of the country, either. It’s Italia. We could even
pronounce it without much thought. France is the same for English speakers.
Germany is where we start to go off the path. Germany is really Deutschland.
There is no place called Germany by its citizens. With Greece as well, there is
no country called that; it’s known as Ellás to its inhabitants. Finland is
really Suomi. Sweden; Sverige. And so on. I confess that I don’t know why we do
this. It’s as if the man we know is named Phillip down the block, we insist on
calling Ted.
Of course, place names evolve. Luxor,
Egypt (Misr) was called by the early Egyptians, Waset. When the Greeks
conquered the country in the late fourth century B.C., they called Waset
Thebes, after one of their own cities. This is the way Antony and Cleopatra
would have referred to it in 30 B.C. Later, under Arab rule, it was known as Al
Uksor, as it is today. Luxor is an English version.
The nation now known as Misr was called
by its ancient dwellers, Kem. This name was still in use in the seventh century
of the current era when the Islamic conquerors arrived. They simply added their
own Arabic article, and it became, Al Kem. Later, as western travelers appeared
and discovered the Egyptian skill in embalming and knowledge of potions in
general, the country name became incorporated into a new science––al-kem-y, or
alchemy. They first naively hoped it was a way of transmuting lead into gold. Today,
we have it as the very respectable science of chemistry.
Here in the Western Hemisphere there
have been fewer changes of name, largely because no national entities with
ancient origins survive. Whatever way the indigenous people referred to these
lands is now largely lost. The principal change is in México, derived from an
Aztec name, and adopted by the people of what was then called New Spain when
they launched the War of Independence in 1810.
Humble beginnings and strange endings. I’ve
been aware of the name changing process for a long time, and I’ve never been
comfortable with it. It appears arrogant to me to rename a country.
Since as a writer I need a lot of help,
a reader volunteered on line some time back to be a proofreader of my
manuscripts at no charge. Proofreading is a skill close to sorcery (or alchemy)
in my experience, since I can rarely do it effectively myself. Soon a stream of
corrections began coming back to me, and I was startled to see that the most
frequently occurring one was my spelling of México
with an accent, which is the way it is spelled in México.
I responded that this was the correct
spelling, and I saw no reason to change it, since it was perfectly
comprehensible as well as being how the natives spelled it. My reader responded
that I didn’t spell Mexican with an
accent, and this was true. I replied that Mexican is an English word, whereas
México is Spanish. Why then she asked, didn’t I use Italia for Italy?
I had no ready answer for this. The
truth was that using the accent was my own small protest to name changing, but
I didn’t want to go any further. My reader departed shortly after this. I
suspect she felt I was being irregular in some way.
I still think of this as the Misr
phenomenon. I was in that country, with a side excursion of a week in Jordan,
to scout locations for a book I was writing. I called it The Amarna Heresy, and I thought of it as Indiana Jones meets
Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Nile.
There’s a sample on my website:
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