A Rose By Any Name

New Zealand Listener, Volume 4, Issue 103, 13 June 1941, Page 5

A Rose By Any Name

|? was interesting, and perhaps a little pathetic, to read recently of how David Lloyd George, Great Britain’s Prime Minister of the first World War, while he was speaking in a debate in the Commons, confused the names of two countries, and of how courteously he was corrected by Winston Churchill, the Prime Minister of the present war. The names which Mr, Lloyd George had confused were Iran and Irak, otherwise Persia and Mesopotamia. There are, of course,

mames which differ only a little in English from those used by the inhabitants of the countries themselves; names such as the Swiss, French and German versions of Switzerland, which are all at least recognisable, If we see a ship tied up to the wharf with Kobnhavn on her stern as the port of registration, we immediately translate it into the more familiar Copenhagen, and with no difficulty. Even where there are alternate names, such as Abyssinia and Ethiopia, Formosa or Taiwan, there is a chance that one will remember. Sometimes, though, the local name and the English version are very different, Japan is properly Nippon, Egypt is Misr, from the old word Misraim, meaning a guarded fortified place, while the real name of China is Chung-Hua Min-Kuo, or the People’s State in the Mid. Albania, at least until the invasion, was locally known as Shqiperm. And, strange as it may seem, the Japanese Emperor is called the Mikado only by foreigners. To the Japanese he is the Imperial Son of Heaven of Great Nippon.-("Changed Names on the Map,’ by Stuart Perry, LL.B., 2YA, June 5),