Many of us may often possess an urge to see the world in fresh ways.
Two German cartographers have produced a set of maps — The Atlas of True Names — that claims to return many of the world’s place names to their original linguistic meaning and renders that meaning into English, according to a report in the German newsmagazine Der Spiegel.
New York? “New Wild Boar Village.”
(Apparently, York, in England, derives from the Old English eofor for wild boar and the Latin vicus for village.)
Great Britain? “Great Land of the Tatooed.”
Halifax? “Remote Corner Where Rough Grass Grows.”
According to Stephan Hormes, one of the creators of the atlas, “the names give you an insight into what the people saw when they first looked at a place, almost with the eyes of children.”
Some of the translated names are more convincing than others, and The Lede does not vouch for the maps’ accuracy, although a few of the equivalences have a ring of truth to them.
Chicago? “Stink Onion,” after a Native American term for the smell of rotting marshland onions.
“City of Boatmen?” Paris, after an
original Celtic word.
Grozny? “The Awesome.”
Zimbabwe? “House of Stones.”
What’s the appeal of such renaming now? At turning points in history, such as this one, people may want to see and write the world afresh. Certainly, many critics of the Bush administration around the globe are hoping the world will look differently in a post-Bush glow.
Mr. Hormes, though, says his inspiration was more mundane: the resonant language of J.R.R. Tolkien’s Middle Earth, the setting of “The Lord of the Rings,” which seemed to translate the world into clearer, more simple terms.
Of course, that may be exactly the wish of the many Bush critics around the world for the Obama era.
“It’s like some kind of re-enchantment of the world,” said Mr. Hormes in an interview by phone from Lübeck (“The Lovely One”). “The world is connected via the internet. Everything is technical. There are big financial problems. Everybody seems exhausted. This gives back some of the childhood feeling.”
More translated names:
Sahara? “Sea of Sand” (unsurprisingly).
Seine?“The Gentle One.”
London? “Hill Fort.”
Hong Kong? “Fragrant Port.”
“Land of the Fire Keepers”? That would be Azerbaijan.
Comments are no longer being accepted.