Roulette Table: To become George Best airport is a humiliation worthy of North Korea
The proliferating habit of changing placenames is a reflection of insecure societies unable to embrace their past
Simon Jenkins
Friday July 14, 2006
The Guardian
Sombre news from Ulan Bator. In honour of Mongolia's 800th anniversary, its airport has been renamed after Genghis Khan. This reflects the newly assertive stature of the former communist state. Its president, the Leeds-educated Nambaryn Enkhbayar, has announced that the spirit of the great khan would once again "lead the Mongolian people to prosperity".
Genghis (or Chingis) Khan is revered as one of the world's great leaders, indeed as the 29th greatest according to an American website's league table. He created an empire from the Caspian to the Pacific, defeating Chinese, Persian, Russian, even European armies. He is credited with a belief in meritocracy, decimalisation, female emancipation, freedom of religion and flat taxes (after a fashion). He also specialised in mass slaughter, razing cities to the ground (saving only the engineers and artists), and pouring molten silver into the ears of insurgent leaders or, if they preferred, suffocating them under his table while he ate dinner. Neoconservatives still often declare themselves "well to the right" of him.
How all this will play with tourists landing at Ulan Bator airport is not clear. Genghis Khan told his generals to treat foreign foes by "robbing them of their wealth, bathing their loved ones in tears, riding their horses and clasping to your bosom their wives and daughters". This brings to mind a number of airlines of my acquaintance. Genghis was the Ruler of All Those Who Live in Felt Tents, which is ominous given the name of the local currency, the tugrug. As for recent DNA estimates that, in the course of his conquests, he became a blood ancestor of some 16 million Asiatics, or 0.25% of the world's population, the new terminal must qualify as a monument to Asian family values. This may or may not be part of the latest Ulan Bator adventure offer: "Train as a Mongol warrior".
I am more concerned by the proliferating habit of changing placenames. This week Liverpool had a bad attack of Genghis Khan syndrome in proposing to rename Penny Lane because it recalls a slave trader, James Penny. The fact was previously unknown to millions familiar with the song of the same name, not to mention the Beatles themselves. If political correctness is to rule Merseyside, what about Liverpool itself? The name must have struck terror into every slave's heart? Why not rechristen it Mandelaville?
There is no reason for this to stop. Colchester has a Stalin Road, running next to Churchill and Roosevelt roads, and Stanley in Durham has a Lenin Terrace. These commemorate a time when Britons regarded Russia as an ally, as it was, in the war against Hitler. I sympathise with estate agents, but history is history. I am sure dozens of Mafekings, Lucknows, Waterloos and Maidas might upset someone somewhere.
Changing placenames is what banana republics do. Cities are creations of centuries of strife and settlement. Only insecure societies dare not recall their past, however chequered. We ridicule Latin American capitals for naming streets after revolutionary dates, and communist states for naming boulevards after "blessed" or "serene" dictators. Even America, normally robust in these matters, demeans itself by naming the airports in its capital after recent Republican leaders, Dulles and Reagan, thereby inviting Democrats to retaliate. In New York, the beautifully named Idlewild was degraded to JFK. Are we now to have a splurge of Nine-Eleven Avenues and War-on-Terror Freeways?
When Robert Mugabe became president of Zimbabwe (Rhodesia) he set about renaming the streets in Harare (Salisbury). Rumour had it that he wanted to name the grandest after his good friend Samora Machel, so he could relegate his disliked neighbour, Kenneth Kaunda, to an alleyway next to the goods yard. I am sure wars have been fought for less.
It was much to Nelson Mandela's credit that after 1993 he refused to change South Africa's name or the names of cities and provinces. He wanted to reassure the whites that this was a constitutional evolution, not a revolution. He saw South Africa's history as a shared one, in which the past, however troubled, was part of the present. It could not be obliterated at the stroke of a geographer's pen. Mandela's successors have sadly proved less loyal to this maturity. Southern Transvaal has become Gauteng, and even the capital, Pretoria, is in the throes of transformation to Tshwane.
This may not be the week to deplore the loss of India's Bombay, along with Calcutta, Madras and Bangalore, to the recent upsurge in regional chauvanism. As in Africa, the British empire did its fair bit of name-changing in honour of that ubiquitous nomenclature imperialist Queen Victoria. But Indians speak a hundred languages and mostly acknowledge English as their shared one. Did they feel humiliated until they could address their letters to Mumbai, Kolkata, Chennai and Bengaluru? Many of the new names were already in use anyway, leading one Bangalore newspaper to announce that the city of Bengaluru would in future be known as Bengaluru. Europe somehow manages with different global and local names for Moscow, Naples, Munich and Florence.
Britain long played host to invading names, be they Brithonic, Celtic, Roman, Saxon, Viking or Norman. Each wave left its linguistic imprint on the landscape, but the earlier usually won. Nothing is so essentially old as the name of a geographical feature. As Colin Renfrew pointed out in Archaeology and Language, placenames were the local words most commonly adopted by invaders. The reason was that early travellers needed to know where they were and dared not rename geography, especially rivers (hence the science of hydronomy). Thus survived the oldest trace elements of past tongues. I am told that Scotland's lost language of Pictish must be studied largely through names.
The Romans imposed names only on their camps, often embracing a Celtic predecessor. Lincoln combines the Latin colonia and the Celtic llyn or lake. Lancaster is a camp, castra, by the River Lune. Adrian Room's admirable Penguin dictionary of placenames gives Pontefract as a rare all-Latin example, meaning broken bridge. Celtic lives on in Devon, Kent, York, Avon and Severn. The Anglo-Saxon invasion brought -tons, -burys and -hams, while the Vikings brought -by and -kirk. Across much of eastern England the tapestry of mixed settlement can be charted through placenames.
The recent emergence of name-change syndrome in Britain is regrettable. An early sign of the tackiness of Blair's court was its 1997 debate over whether to rename Heathrow as Diana international airport (not to mention the Diana Dome). Mercifully, this iron-age camp and medieval settlement survived such threats to its identity. But what harm did lovely Speke Hall do to Liverpool that it should be wiped off the airport map in favour of John Lennon? As for Belfast City Airport, being renamed after George Best is a humiliation worthy of North Korea.
Is London City airport now to become the Anschutz Memorial Gateway, with roulette-table runways, and Stansted to become Posh-and-Becks international? Is Euston Road to be renamed the Avenue of the 7th of July and Downing Street renamed Blair Close? Have we come to that? It rather makes me long for Genghis Khan.
simon.jenkins@guardian.co.uk
Simon Jenkins
Friday July 14, 2006
The Guardian
Sombre news from Ulan Bator. In honour of Mongolia's 800th anniversary, its airport has been renamed after Genghis Khan. This reflects the newly assertive stature of the former communist state. Its president, the Leeds-educated Nambaryn Enkhbayar, has announced that the spirit of the great khan would once again "lead the Mongolian people to prosperity".
Genghis (or Chingis) Khan is revered as one of the world's great leaders, indeed as the 29th greatest according to an American website's league table. He created an empire from the Caspian to the Pacific, defeating Chinese, Persian, Russian, even European armies. He is credited with a belief in meritocracy, decimalisation, female emancipation, freedom of religion and flat taxes (after a fashion). He also specialised in mass slaughter, razing cities to the ground (saving only the engineers and artists), and pouring molten silver into the ears of insurgent leaders or, if they preferred, suffocating them under his table while he ate dinner. Neoconservatives still often declare themselves "well to the right" of him.
How all this will play with tourists landing at Ulan Bator airport is not clear. Genghis Khan told his generals to treat foreign foes by "robbing them of their wealth, bathing their loved ones in tears, riding their horses and clasping to your bosom their wives and daughters". This brings to mind a number of airlines of my acquaintance. Genghis was the Ruler of All Those Who Live in Felt Tents, which is ominous given the name of the local currency, the tugrug. As for recent DNA estimates that, in the course of his conquests, he became a blood ancestor of some 16 million Asiatics, or 0.25% of the world's population, the new terminal must qualify as a monument to Asian family values. This may or may not be part of the latest Ulan Bator adventure offer: "Train as a Mongol warrior".
I am more concerned by the proliferating habit of changing placenames. This week Liverpool had a bad attack of Genghis Khan syndrome in proposing to rename Penny Lane because it recalls a slave trader, James Penny. The fact was previously unknown to millions familiar with the song of the same name, not to mention the Beatles themselves. If political correctness is to rule Merseyside, what about Liverpool itself? The name must have struck terror into every slave's heart? Why not rechristen it Mandelaville?
There is no reason for this to stop. Colchester has a Stalin Road, running next to Churchill and Roosevelt roads, and Stanley in Durham has a Lenin Terrace. These commemorate a time when Britons regarded Russia as an ally, as it was, in the war against Hitler. I sympathise with estate agents, but history is history. I am sure dozens of Mafekings, Lucknows, Waterloos and Maidas might upset someone somewhere.
Changing placenames is what banana republics do. Cities are creations of centuries of strife and settlement. Only insecure societies dare not recall their past, however chequered. We ridicule Latin American capitals for naming streets after revolutionary dates, and communist states for naming boulevards after "blessed" or "serene" dictators. Even America, normally robust in these matters, demeans itself by naming the airports in its capital after recent Republican leaders, Dulles and Reagan, thereby inviting Democrats to retaliate. In New York, the beautifully named Idlewild was degraded to JFK. Are we now to have a splurge of Nine-Eleven Avenues and War-on-Terror Freeways?
When Robert Mugabe became president of Zimbabwe (Rhodesia) he set about renaming the streets in Harare (Salisbury). Rumour had it that he wanted to name the grandest after his good friend Samora Machel, so he could relegate his disliked neighbour, Kenneth Kaunda, to an alleyway next to the goods yard. I am sure wars have been fought for less.
It was much to Nelson Mandela's credit that after 1993 he refused to change South Africa's name or the names of cities and provinces. He wanted to reassure the whites that this was a constitutional evolution, not a revolution. He saw South Africa's history as a shared one, in which the past, however troubled, was part of the present. It could not be obliterated at the stroke of a geographer's pen. Mandela's successors have sadly proved less loyal to this maturity. Southern Transvaal has become Gauteng, and even the capital, Pretoria, is in the throes of transformation to Tshwane.
This may not be the week to deplore the loss of India's Bombay, along with Calcutta, Madras and Bangalore, to the recent upsurge in regional chauvanism. As in Africa, the British empire did its fair bit of name-changing in honour of that ubiquitous nomenclature imperialist Queen Victoria. But Indians speak a hundred languages and mostly acknowledge English as their shared one. Did they feel humiliated until they could address their letters to Mumbai, Kolkata, Chennai and Bengaluru? Many of the new names were already in use anyway, leading one Bangalore newspaper to announce that the city of Bengaluru would in future be known as Bengaluru. Europe somehow manages with different global and local names for Moscow, Naples, Munich and Florence.
Britain long played host to invading names, be they Brithonic, Celtic, Roman, Saxon, Viking or Norman. Each wave left its linguistic imprint on the landscape, but the earlier usually won. Nothing is so essentially old as the name of a geographical feature. As Colin Renfrew pointed out in Archaeology and Language, placenames were the local words most commonly adopted by invaders. The reason was that early travellers needed to know where they were and dared not rename geography, especially rivers (hence the science of hydronomy). Thus survived the oldest trace elements of past tongues. I am told that Scotland's lost language of Pictish must be studied largely through names.
The Romans imposed names only on their camps, often embracing a Celtic predecessor. Lincoln combines the Latin colonia and the Celtic llyn or lake. Lancaster is a camp, castra, by the River Lune. Adrian Room's admirable Penguin dictionary of placenames gives Pontefract as a rare all-Latin example, meaning broken bridge. Celtic lives on in Devon, Kent, York, Avon and Severn. The Anglo-Saxon invasion brought -tons, -burys and -hams, while the Vikings brought -by and -kirk. Across much of eastern England the tapestry of mixed settlement can be charted through placenames.
The recent emergence of name-change syndrome in Britain is regrettable. An early sign of the tackiness of Blair's court was its 1997 debate over whether to rename Heathrow as Diana international airport (not to mention the Diana Dome). Mercifully, this iron-age camp and medieval settlement survived such threats to its identity. But what harm did lovely Speke Hall do to Liverpool that it should be wiped off the airport map in favour of John Lennon? As for Belfast City Airport, being renamed after George Best is a humiliation worthy of North Korea.
Is London City airport now to become the Anschutz Memorial Gateway, with roulette-table runways, and Stansted to become Posh-and-Becks international? Is Euston Road to be renamed the Avenue of the 7th of July and Downing Street renamed Blair Close? Have we come to that? It rather makes me long for Genghis Khan.
simon.jenkins@guardian.co.uk
