Читать книгу The Origin of Names, Words and Everything in Between - Patrick Foote - Страница 10

If you are not reading this on a boat, plane, submarine, hot air balloon, moon, extraterrestrial planet, or literally the Sun (are you a bit warm by any chance?), then you are most likely reading this in a country! Each country on this planet has a deep history, a culture of its own and, of course, a name! Much like the history of the country, the names also have deep and interesting histories. A far more sensible book would put these countries in alphabetical, or maybe geographical order. This, however, isn’t that sensible book. Imagine this as something of a world tour. One moment you may be reading about a cold Nordic country, the next you are in the Caribbean. Let’s take a look!

RUSSIA

Let’s kick things off with the huge country of Russia. It can be hard to imagine just how big Russia is seeing it on a map, but did you know that the country covers eleven time zones? When it is midnight in Moscow, the people of Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky are already getting on with their day. Russia is so huge that the entirety of the United Kingdom, Germany, France, and Spain can fit into it with plenty of room to spare!

Like a lot of countries that we will come across, Russia was named after the people who lived and settled the land: in this case, the Rus’ people. The Rus’ were a tribe of Vikings who are thought to have come from Sweden in the ninth century. Even though the lands of Russia were populated at the time, some scholars believe that the local people of the town of Novgorod in Russia asked them to come to settle their disputes with each other.

Imagine arguing with your brother or sister so much that you both came to the decision to ask your parents for help. Well, the Rus’ stayed in the land, founding cities and opening up trade routes around the country. So much so that, by the sixteenth century, we have evidence the land was called Russi in Medieval Latin, meaning the people of Russia.

If Russia is named after the Rus’ people, then how did the Rus’ people get their name? It’s thought that their name comes from the Old Norse term rods-, meaning the men who row, as rowing was the main way the rods (and all other Vikings) traversed the waters around them.

PAKISTAN

When you hear a name like Pakistan, you would think its roots lie in the ancient world, as it’s an equally ancient-sounding name. Yet, what if I told you the origin of Pakistan’s name cannot just be pinpointed to an exact date, but also pinpointed to the exact location where it was coined? The time and place? Well, it wasn’t somewhere in India thousands of years ago, but it was first recorded on the 28th of January 1933 at 3 Humberstone Road, Cambridge, England.

It was in this house that Indian expat student Choudhary Rahmat Ali wrote his “Now or Never: Are We to Live or Perish Forever?” pamphlet. Rahmat expressed his belief that his fellow Muslims living in the provinces of India should gain independence and have their own nation. He dubbed this nation Pakistan, with the “i” being added later. The name is an acronym of the names of the Indian provinces he wished were independent from India.

The P comes from Punjab, the A from the Afghan Province, the K from Kashmir, the S from Sindh, and the “tan” coming from Baluchistan, but the -stan suffix is seen with other nations such as Afghanistan, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan and comes from the Persian and Urdu language meaning “the place of.”

Speaking of the Persian language, the name takes on another meaning in this language. In Persian, the name means “the Place of the Pure” as pak is the Persian word for pure. So yes, Pakistan’s name is an acronym AND a pun rolled into one!

AUSTRALIA

Australia is the country of the Aboriginals—a people with their own amazing mythology. Yet the name we know the country by today has its roots in Greek mythology. The Greeks had a god for everything. Dionysus was the Greek god of wine, Priapos was the god of vegetable gardens, but the Greek god we are interested in today is Notus/Notos, the Greek god of the southern wind.

The Romans adopted the Greek mythology for themselves, but one thing they did was change the names of the gods: Zeus became Jupiter, Ares became Mars, and Notus’ name was changed to Auster by the Romans. With the name of the god of the southern wind being Auster, the name became a term for “south” and “southern” in Latin, and Latin is a language with a huge influence in the English language.

This was most noticeable with the concept of Terra Australis during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Before our planet had been fully explored, a lot of mapmakers had to guess and predict what land there was in undiscovered parts of the world. At that time, we knew there were copious amounts of land in the northern hemisphere, so there must have been huge amounts of land in the southern hemisphere too.

When the land was first discovered by Dutch explorer Abel Tasman, he dubbed the land he found New Holland (pretty obvious explanation there since Abel was Dutch, after all), but that name didn’t stick. James Cook first set foot on the island in 1770 and dubbed it New South Wales. But it was Captain Matthew Flinders, in the 1800s, who was the first to navigate the entire coast of the land. This proved it was in fact an island and popularized the name Australia, referencing the legendary Terra Australis. The name became official in 1824.

FRANCE

France, much like the nation of Russia, is named after the people who lived there, in this case, the Franks. The country’s Latin name is Francia which means “country of the Franks.” The name originally belonged to the entire Frankish Kingdom, which at its peak not only included the majority of modern France, but parts of modern Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium, Switzerland, and Spain!

The Franks were originally a Germanic people who lived in the north of Europe around the Rhine River. They invaded the land of France (which back then was called Gaul under the control of Julius Caesar and the Roman Empire) and made it their own.

But how exactly did the Franks get their name? Traditionally, one of the popular theories is that they got their name from their weapon of choice—a type of throwing axe that was called a Francisca. How cool is it that France is a country named after a people who are named after a weapon! I mean, it would be cool, if it were true. More recent evidence points to the axe being named after the people rather than the other way around. Nowadays, it’s believed that the name Franks means “freeman,” coming from the Old English franc/franca meaning “free,” possibly because the Franks were tax-free after they conquered Gaul.

It is also from this idea of being free where the term “to be frank” is thought to come from, meaning to be “free to do/say as you wish.”

THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

Of course, this country isn’t simply called America, but it is commonly referred to as just that. What is just called America (sort of) is the continent that the USA is situated on. Some consider the landmass with Canada to the north and Chile to the south as a single continent of the Americas, while others break them into two separate continents of North America and South America. Panama is generally considered to be the most southern part of North America, with Colombia being the most northern part of South America on the mainland.

The story everyone seems to know is that of Christopher Columbus being the first European to discover and set foot in America. Yet the person we are much more interested in today is Italian explorer Amerigo Vespucci. While Columbus still thought that the land he discovered was the western side of Asia, it was Amerigo who put forward the idea that the land was in fact completely separate from Asia, and with foresight on our side, we know who was correct there.

Amerigo didn’t name the land after himself (what a humble guy) and instead simply called this land “the New World” as it was land completely new to the Europeans who went on to traverse it. So, who was it that named the land after the Italian explorer? That honor goes to German mapmaker Martin Waldseemüller. When he was creating a map to reflect all the discoveries made (imagine being alive at the time when the maps weren’t finished yet!), he took it upon himself to label the area where—at my estimation—modern Argentina, Chile, and Paraguay are, as simply America, coming from the Latinization of Amerigo’s name Americus Vespucius. Amerigo Vespucci is thought to be named after Saint Emeric of Hungary, meaning that the name America was coined by a German, who named it after an Italian, who was named after a Hungarian!

As for the “United States of” part of the country’s name well…that’s not as exciting. When the country gained its independence, it was just that—a collection of states that were united. It started with the thirteen founding colonies, and now is the fifty states we all know today. The term’s earliest recording is from an anonymous article written in a Virginia newspaper in 1776, with “United States of America” going on to appear in the draft of the Declaration of Independence and in the preamble of the Constitution itself.

KENYA

Kenya has ostriches to thank for how it got its name. Okay, so that might be a bit of a stretch. The name Kenya strikes up the impression of the classic, almost prehistoric idea of Africa many have in mind, yet that name is pretty modern. We don’t really have any idea of what the people of the land would have called Kenya. The name was officially given to country when it was declared a crown colony of Britain in 1920.

The country is named after Mount Kenya, the second tallest mountain in Kenya and one of its most iconic landmarks. So how did Mount Kenya get its name? There are multiple suggestions as to how this name came to be. One of the more popular stories is when Johann Ludwig Krapf and Johannes Rebmann (two missionaries exploring the land in 1846) asked their native guide what they called the huge mountain they saw in the distance. The guide told them the mountain was called “kiima kya kenia” in his language of Kamba. “Kenia” translates to glitter or shine in relation to the shining ice that capped the mountain.

Nonetheless, Kamba wasn’t the only language in the region. The Ameru people called the mountain kirimira which means “mountain of white feather,” once again referencing the ice on the mountains. The Kikuyu people called the mountain Kirinyaga or Kiri Nyaga which can be either translated to “God’s Resting Place” or “the Place with the ostriches.” Some even feel the mountain looks similar to the male ostrich with the black of the mountain and the white of the snow sharing the same colors as the huge flightless birds, but, like I said, it’s a tad of a stretch. It was one of these dialect names for the mountain that led to the mispronunciation in English as Kenya.

GREAT BRITAIN

Okay, so hear me out. I know technically there is no country simply called Great Britain. Great Britain is the geographic name for the island that is home to England, Wales, and Scotland which joins up with northern Ireland to become the country of the United Kingdom. But come on, the UK as a name is kind of boring.

Great Britain, on the other hand, has a much more interesting etymology. The name Britain has its roots in a tribe of people that Greek explorer Pytheas came across in the land of Britain in the fourth century BCE. These people were called the Prettani, leading to Pytheas giving two names to the land he found them in—Brettania and Prettanike. These two names eventually led to the creation of just one name Pretannia, which sounds an awful lot like a name we still hear today, Britannia.

So, with the Prettani and the name Prettanike for the country, where did the B at the start of its name come from? It seems that when writing, Pytheas had a habit of using Ps and Bs interchangeably. It was the spelling with the B that stuck around when the Romans took over the land and dubbed it the Province of Britannia.

Yet this Roman province only covered modern day England and Wales, so what was going on with Scotland? Alas, the Romans could never truly conquer the Scottish, so the Scots stayed as they were, separated from Britain, with the Roman part of Britain eventually becoming known as the Kingdom of England.

The “great” in Great Britain kind of has two different meanings. The first being that it’s greater in size compared to France’s Brittany. But it officially got the title of Great Britain to refer to the Kingdom of England and the Kingdom of Scotland when King James VI became king of both nations. Both countries came together to be called the United Kingdom of Great Britain.

Britain is also sometimes referred to by a different name, Blighty. While this might just sound like a cute pet name for the land, there is actually more history to it than that. The nickname was born out of a sense of homesickness that Brits who were away from the country came to use with affection during the peak of the Victorian rule of India, and in the trenches of World War I. It comes from the Urdu word vilayati, which means “foreign,” which was a common name Europeans visiting India would be called. At one point the v was misheard as a b, and bilayati became Blighty, blimey!

THE NETHERLANDS

If you think of this land of windmills, stroopwafel, clogs, and tulips, then you may have heard it referred to as a different name, Holland. The country, however, is actually called the Netherlands. So, why does this one nation have two seemingly interchangeable names, and, more importantly, where do these two names even come from?

What’s the difference between these two names? Simply put, Holland is a region of the Netherlands. Calling all of the Netherlands Holland would be like calling all of the United States of America just Texas. The region of Holland in the Netherlands is on the country’s west coast and is actually split into the two provinces of North and South Holland. The whole country gets mistakenly called Holland because so much of the nation’s identity is within the Holland regions. Holland is home to all the classically Dutch things, like the aforementioned windmills and tulips. Holland is also home to the some of the Netherlands’ most famous cities such as the Hague, Delft, Rotterdam, and of course, Amsterdam.

The name of the Netherlands does not have the most exciting of origins. It is simply the land of nether, but what exactly does this mean then? The word nether means a few, very similar things: low, under, and beneath, as in how a certain part of your body is called “the nether regions.” Or even how the hellscape in Minecraft is called the Nether. But the Netherlands has little to do with your private area or a blocky hell. The “nether” in Netherlands refers to just how low and flat the country is. In fact, about one-third of the country’s land is beneath sea level! This makes the Netherlands quite a nether land!

The name of Holland, however, is thought to come from the Old Dutch word for wood, holt, and the Old Dutch word for land, lant. This means the name in Old Dutch translates to Woodland, though weirdly there’s not actually that much woodland in Holland. A folklore etymology of the name Holland is that it comes from the term Hollow Land, once again referencing Holland’s below sea level geography.

THE ISLE OF MAN

Now, I know what you’re thinking: Is the Isle of Man even a country? Well sort of. It’s something that is called a crown dependency, meaning that it is part of the British crown but not a part of the UK. So, even though they use the British pound, they have their own variation of it, as well as their own flag, language, passport, and government.

At first glance, the name of the country might seem incredibly sexist—an island just for men?! But I can assure you that there are both men and women living on the Isle of Man. The “Man” in the Isle of Man does not refer to the entire male sex of the island, but rather one man, whose name also happens to be Man, as his full name is Manannan Mac y Lir in the Manx language. Manannan is a god of Celtic and Manx mythology, thought to be son of Lir, the Irish god of the sea, making his son lord of the sea. Manannan is believed to be the first ruler of the island who also lent his name to it. The Isle of Man’s inhabitants hold deeply onto their mythology, claiming that the severe winds, fog, and mists that cover the island at times are his cloak, protecting the island from outsiders.

What’s also interesting about the Isle of Man is the variety of languages that have been introduced to the island over its history. The island has roots in Celtic languages. The island’s capital, Douglas, is thought to come from the early Celtic duboglassio meaning “black river,” while the town of Ramsey on the island was given its name from the Viking settlers of the island and comes from the Old Norse gohrams-á, meaning “Wild Garlic River.”

JAPAN

Japan’s famous nickname is “the land of the rising sun,” but this nickname also shines some light (see what I did there?) on the country’s actual name too. The name has its roots all the way to the Chinese jih pun which translates into “sun rise.”

The Chinese referred to Japan by this name due to where Japan is in relation to China. Japan is east of China and, of course, it’s from the east that the sun rises. The names of Japan are often associated with China, as ancient China had a huge influence on the early civilizations of Japan. Yet, this wasn’t their first name for the country. Originally, China referred to Japan under the simple name Wa which is thought to mean several things ranging from submissive and obedient, to even meaning dwarf or pygmy!

Unsurprisingly, the people of Japan didn’t like this name. It was the Japanese Prince Shotoku who first coined the term “land of the rising sun” when writing to the Chinese emperor of the time. He referred to Japan as “the land of the rising sun” and to China as “the land of the setting sun,” which clearly is a nickname that hasn’t become as popular in China.

All of this led to Japan’s name in Kanji looking like this 日本. Kanji is one of the writing systems of Japan and has its origins in China. Yet, said aloud, these characters do not read as Japan; they read as Japan’s name in Japanese, Nippon.

As time went on, this name got misheard to the aforementioned one. The name of Nippon in Japanese became jih pun in Chinese. It was this name that Marco Polo heard of as a land of riches and gold. In his travels, he wrote the name down as Zipangu, which eventually turned into the name we all know today.