They say that everybody comes from somewhere, but I was wondering how did these somewheres get their names? It looks like countries names are just like our first names that are handed to us without input and inherited, arbitrary, and lately — especially — absurd. Sometimes we get names we don’t want and efforts to change them don’t stick, Same with countries.
My extensive research on this subject uncovered the fact that the majority of country names fall into just four categories:
a directional description of the country
a feature of the land
a tribal name
an important person (most likely a man)
The way countries get their names is almost never democratic, and very few are rooted in national qualities we like to associate with them, like liberty, strength or justice.
I found an interesting book — the Oxford Concise Dictionary of World Place-Names, by John Everett-Heath. If you’re interested in this subject, you should take a look at this book.
Name origins are often (usually) murky and the book warns that “myths and legends may be entertaining, but rarely of value.”
About a third of the world’s countries got their current names from some older group of people. France is named for the Franks, Italy is named for the Vitali tribe, Switzerland for the Schwyz people, and Vietnam means Viet people of the south, to name a few.
Recently (if you can call maybe the last hundred or so years recent) countries have started to reclaim much older identities — for example, in 1947 the Gold Coast gained independence from the British and was renamed Ghana.
A few countries have names that describe their people’s attributes — Upper Volta, in western Africa, was re-named Burkina faso in 1984, and means “land of honest men” or “land of incorruptible people.”
About a quarter of the world’s country names come from some aspect of the land. An example — Algeria is named after its capital city, Algiers, meaning “the islands.” That name once described the city’s bay, which at one time had tiny islands in it, but today they’ve become connected to the mainland or been destroyed in the development of the harbor.
Some names about land features come from explorers or outsiders that saw the land through the eyes of “foreigners.”
There is some disagreement about which explorer named Costa Rica (“the rich coast,”) but some think it was Christopher Columbus, who saw indigenous people wearing gold and didn’t realize it was imported.
Singapore means “lion city,” and the lion head is a national symbol. But there aren’t any known lions in Singapore. According to legend the Sumatran prince Sang Nila Utama was hunting in Singapore and came across an animal he thought was a lion, “singa” in Malay, and gave the name Singa Pura to the island he was on.
The United States of America is named for the Italian explorer America Vespucci, who argued that —despite what everyone else thought at the time — the American continent was not part of the Iniies. In 1507, German cartographer Martin Waldseemüller, who literally put America on the map, named the area for “the discoverer Amerigo….as if it were the American land, or America.”
Our countries’ names give us a sense of pride and our leaders use them as emotional triggers in speeches and create slogans around country names (e.g., “make America great again.”)
So I guess what’s in a name is important and everyone should be proud of their country, but someone said that a man’s feet should be planted in his country, but his eyes should survey the world. Today — that sounds like good advice.
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