#UPPER VOLTA COLONIAL IMPACT CRACK#

''No one ever calls the country >Soyuz Sovetskikh Sotsialisticheskikh Respublik,'' Mr.

(We treat the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics as we do the Europeans. That's a bad reason for inconsistency it is surely patronizing and may even be considered reverse racism. ''For us, Norway is not >Norge, Germany is not >Deutschland, Spain is not >Espana and certainly we do not call Finland >Suomen Tasavalta.'' (Maybe Denmark is Lower Tasavalta.) Our refusal to adopt European names and spellings, contrasted with our acquiescence in non-European nomenclature, suggests that we are permitting a political bias to affect our linguistic judgment. ''People can call their countries and their cities anything they like,'' writes Byron Farwell, in a column for The Blue Ridge (Va.) Leader, ''but why must we English-speakers follow suit?'' Only Latin American, Asian and African countries get this favored treatment European countries and cities are not the objects of our deference. (If the copy editors want to lather themselves up with Myanmar-Shave, that's their business, but I'm still traveling down that old Burma Road.) If local preferences are to dictate, and Rangoon is now meekly accepted as >Yangon, why don't we call Rome >Roma, as the Romans do? Or if we are transliterating sounds, write Paris as >Paree, to match the French pronunciation? To be consistent, Vienna should be >Veen, as citizens of what is spelled >Wien pronounce it.

The New York Times, to its credit, has never adopted >Kampuchea, although it has recently started using >Myanmar for the country most of us know as >Burma. Fine but if they want to change the names again, they should be required to wait.Īccommodationists, doves, assorted linguistic roundheels and spelling reformers will say, ''A place is named whatever the local people name it,'' so if >Cambodia sounds like >Kampuchea in Khmer, that's the way we all must transliterate the sounds. When British Honduras, British Guiana and Dutch Guiana became independent after that, they called themselves >Belize, Guyana and >Surinam. Upper Volta's organizers had their chance when the country proclaimed its independence in 1960.

#UPPER VOLTA COLONIAL IMPACT CRACK#

Safire's Law of Nation-Naming: You get only one crack at a new name in each century. >Burkina Faso means 'country of incorruptible people.' '' That's fine for them, and the United Nations can change all the metal place cards at the table, but it's still >Upper Volta to me.

That's the new name chosen by the government of Upper Volta, which apparently tired of being asked, ''Whatever happened to Lower Volta?'' (There never was one.) A spokesperson for that country's Mission to the United Nations said, ''We changed the name because >Upper Volta was a colonial name not from us but from the French Government, and because we are more than just a location on the river Volta.

I will go along with this change in about a year, when I become sure the Chadians mean it and everybody knows where the two cities are.īut ixnay on >Burkina Faso. THE PEOPLE OF Chad had good reason to change the name of >Fort-Archambault to >Sarh, and >Fort-Lamy to >Ndjamena: the new names are less warlike, contain no memories of a colonial past and are easier for local residents to pronounce.

Upper volta colonial impact