We had an intermezzo early last year, and some new information has been piling up that's too long for short add-ons at the end of a posting, so we need another intermezzo now. We'll continue with the Ohio River and the R&R of OTR, its Renewal & Renaissance, in the next posting.

On 4 March this year I went to a reception where I met three very interesting language colleagues. It doesn't always work out that such gatherings of like-minded (language) people yield a flash of knowledge, but this one did for me, and I want to record here what I've learned. I've always said that formal coursework (which ended for me at age 50 in 1990 in Málaga, as reported on the last posting) is only the start of the learning experience. I will identify the reception and the three individuals who enlightened me after we do a proper lead-up to it, including some background.

Transcreation    I'll mention later who taught me that evening what transcreation is. It's something I'd always visualized as occurring, but just didn't know it was a "thing", which it is, apparently mostly in the advertising and marketing world, but also affects language.

It turns out that transcreation fits in neatly with the other trans- words involving language: translation, a change from one language to another, and transliteration, a change from one alphabet to another. For instance if we look at the Russian word дом, it can be transliterated from the Cyrillic alphabet to the Latin alphabet, resulting in "dom". But it can also be translated, resulting in "house" (think "dom[icile]"). Those changes are obvious enough, but when might transcreation come into it? Not frequently, since it isn't always needed.

The explanation of transcreation sounds counterintuitive and oxymoronic: sometimes the most accurate translation is not the best, and a less accurate translation fits the situation better, either for cultural or language reasons, and ends up with a better overall result. The translator wants to best maintain style, intent, and tone, which is why a second, alternate choice might be better than the first. It might help to understand if you describe transcreation as creative translation, and in the advertising and marketing world you need to get a product just right. I have two anecdotes, and for our purposes, they apply mostly to language differences, rather than cultural.

Sometimes either a name or its translation has a different meaning in another language. An example I found online is when Honda introduced a model that it named "Fitta" in Sweden, they discovered, too late, that the word "fitta" in Swedish is a slang term for primary female anatomy! So transcreation had to come into play: they renamed the model "Honda Jazz" and marketed it successfully in Sweden. As it turns out, though, there was no actual translation involved in this case, but it did involve a modification of a name.

You can see how transcreation has to move a name away from the original, which might evoke a negative response in another language, and has to attempt to elicit the same response in the target country as the original did in the source language.

The other example is similar, but is one I heard years ago, and oddly, also involves a car. When Chevrolet introduced its "Nova" some years ago, they wondered why it wasn't too popular in Latin America. It was then pointed out to them that in Spanish, no va means "it doesn’t go", a killer concept for an automobile! However, I do not know how transcreation was used to solve their problem, though it obviously was needed.

I suspect that we've all come across cheaper, imported products whose names just don't work. A hypothetical case: you come across a "Bright Dawn" can opener from another country. A name like that might work there, where poetic imagery is prized, but elsewhere, perhaps a "Handy Dandy" can opener would sell better, where practicality is prized. And let's not get started with imported instruction manuals that might be in extensive need of transcreation.

Leaving the advertising and marketing world, we'll see shortly how transcreation is frequently needed when putting a foreign name into Chinese.

Hànzi & Romanization    Not all writing systems are alphabetic. Notable among them is the Chinese writing system, which we discussed in 2009/31. (We discussed the Japanese writing system in 2009/32. It uses blended writing systems, but leans heavily on the Chinese one.) If you don't remember 2009/31, you might enjoy going back and reviewing it as an intellectual exercise. We talk about a number of individual characters, and in the end, have a text in English that substitutes 21 Chinese characters for English words. If you've read the posting, you'll be able to read the paragraph with little trouble. I think it's one of the best postings I've done.

But let's dip our toe into that topic a bit. Chinese characters (hànzi, Z=TS) represent concepts. They are used to represent Mandarin words, which are typically monosyllabic. But if you don't know Chinese, seeing one of the hànzi gives you no idea whatsoever of how to say the word. For this, romanizations have been developed over time. Popular for a long time was the Wade-Giles system, which romanized Chinese from a Western point of view. Today, the system used is Pinyin (PY), which is neater and reflects better internal Chinese points of view as to the phonemes (the sounds, more or less) of Mandarin.

Someone not knowing Chinese, like myself, would have no idea what these three hànzi refer to, let alone how to pronounce the words they represent. This is where you need romanization. (Note that many of the romanizations used in this posting will exclude tone marks.)
The older Wade-Giles (WG) version of the above name is Mao tse-tung. The newer Pinyin version is Mao Zedong, which is now standard. WG used the digraph TS for that (unaspirated) sound, which might be easier from the Western point of view, while PY opts for a single letter Z (as in pizza), which is more compact, but which the Westerner has to learn how to pronounce. Here's one more:

This is the name of a famous 19C Dowager Empress.
WG used Tz'u-hsi. TS' would be the spelling for the aspirated TS sound (TS^h), but before a U it's spelled as TZ'.
Of the two sounds reminiscent of English SH, WG did actually use SH for one, and reversed the letters to HS for the other, shown here.

On the other hand, PY writes the name as Cixi, which seems startlingly different. C is used for that same aspirated TS (TS^h), as in the name of the German city Celle, and X is used for that other type of SH sound.
While a Westerner could more easily "fake" a pronunciation using the now antiquated Wade-Giles spelling, it takes a bit more knowledge of Pinyin to be able to pronounce the Pinyin spelling. This is equally true, for instance, when discussing the city of Xi'an, the location of the Terracotta Warriors—or in pronouncing mingde daxue.

The Reception    That background aside, let's talk about the event. Every December, the NYC Chapter of the Middlebury Alumni Association has its holiday party, always at some spectacular venue. Usually some 600-800 alumni attend, mostly from the regular academic year (and most are too, too young!), but language school alumni are also part of the mix. It was once subsidized, but now there is a modest registration fee for the venue and for refreshments.

But in recent years, there has been a more intimate gathering hosted by the Middlebury Language Schools. Frequently, it's been at the Roger Smith Hotel on Lex & 47th, hosted—and financed--by a daughter and mother in the family that owns the hotel, both alumnae of the Escuela Española / Spanish School. This year, though, the reception was at an art gallery and auction house called Doyle, on E 87th Street (one block north of the old German Yorkville on E 86th). The hostess was again a member of the Doyle family, and is an alumna of the Русская Школа / Russkaya Shkola / Russian School. While a bit more modest, it was a pleasant evening, especially being in an art gallery.

In addition to being an opportunity for socializing, there was a distinguished three-person panel that spoke on the topic "The State of Language Education Today"--but that's not the purpose of this posting. The purpose is a minor point I found very interesting that one of the panelists said, which for me became the high point of the evening, and resulted in this posting.

This panelist had been mentioned in the email announcement as Brian Burke ’97, Chinese ’95, which seems to mean he has touched both bases--he was both an undergraduate at Middlebury, Class of 1997, and in 1995, also attended the 中文学校 / zhōngwén xuéxiào / Chinese School (see below for discussion of this name. A quick reminder that ZH is very roughly reminiscent of English CH, just as X is of SH. You should be able to "fake" saying this name in Mandarin, though not the tones shown by the tone marks.)

As Brian Burke introduced himself, he very modestly said he was a lawyer who frequently travels to, and works in, China, since he speaks Mandarin. The introductory point he was making was that, when he first started going to China, people would ask him where he learned Mandarin so well, and he told them at 明德大学 / mìngde daxué / Middlebury College. But as time went on, when people would compliment him on his Mandarin, they would tell him right away that he must have gone to mìngde daxué!

Now I think that was a charming, and very appropriate, anecdote to tell a room full of Middlebury graduates, but what startled me was his using the term mìngde daxué, that I'd never heard before. What was that all about? How do you get that from the original?

And so, after the panel discussion, with great interest I went right up to him, introduced myself, and gave him my own Middlebury background, mentioning the DML, plus my three major languages, German, French, and Spanish. As impressed as I was with his background, he was kind enough to complement mine. But I got right to the point, and asked him about mìngde daxué. He explained it, including the fact that daxué is really "university", since that fits the situation best, and we discussed it a bit. (Needless to say, the phrase didn't register with me on the spot. I've since had to work on learning about it, as follows.)

It's no surprise that I admire people who like language, and who may have learned or studied one in the past, to varying degrees of competency. Even more, I admire someone who's become fluent in a language. (But a caveat: I've known people who get so full of themselves that they think their language is unique, or even the "best". I've taught with at least a couple of such teachers, and admire them far less because of their parochial attitude.)

On the other hand, I'm highly impressed with anyone who is both fluent in one second language and also an expert in another profession, such as Brian Burke. I'll also cite my friend Joe, who had had a dual major, Spanish and biology, then went to med school to become a physician.

Needless to say, I'm equally impressed by someone with two (or more) second languages, such as friend Allan, who's done German and Danish (and more) and who's presently in Warsaw teaching English and learning Polish. And so it was with the two other guests that I met at the reception, Sam and Zilin.

With my head aspin about Chinese again for the first time since the 2009 postings on the writing system and my 2013 visit to China, I sat down with Sam Davis, who I'd gotten to know earlier in the reception. He was chatting with Zilin Cui (remember Pinyin spelling! C is roughly TS!). The three of us had a nice long chat about mìngde daxué, which we followed up by email in days subsequent to the reception.

As for being multilingual, Sam Davis is a conference interpreter and translator for German, Russian, and English, with an MA in Conference Interpretation from the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey CA. He is a translator for German to English, certified by the American Translators Association, and a certified medical interpreter for Russian. He's married to a Taiwanese woman, and has a good knowledge of Mandarin, as they travel to China frequently.

I first asked Sam about mìngde daxué, which is when he introduced me to Zilin, sitting next to him. He later wrote: . . . unfortunately, my Mandarin is shamefully rudimentary considering I've been living with a Taiwanese woman for over a decade, and I can't remember the translation of Middlebury that was used (other than daxue, which, as you mentioned, is "university,)" but that's not too helpful.

I then discussed the matter with Zilin Cui, and she followed up with emails to both of us. Zilin also has an MA in Conference Interpretation from the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey CA, which is, I assume, how she and Sam know each other. Her languages are Chinese (Mandarin), English, and Spanish, with experience living and working in China, the US, Chile, and Spain. Her clients include UN agencies. Since one should always work INTO a native (or near-native) language Sam does German into English; Zilin does interpretation either way between Chinese and English or between Chinese and Spanish, and does translation either way between Chinese and English, but otherwise translates from Spanish into Chinese or Spanish into English. She does three kinds of interpretation, simultaneous, consecutive, and also chuchotage. In French, chuchoter is "to whisper", so chuchotage interpretation involves leaning toward and whispering into the client's ear. Look at her website:

https://www.chinesetransnyc.com/

Anyway, I think you'll agree there was a powerhouse of language ability at the Doyle art gallery that evening. I'll also mention now that it was Zilin who introduced me to the concept of transcreation. You'll see now how it applies quite fittingly to Chinese.

Zilin tried to find online why Middlebury is called mìngde in Chinese, but to no avail. So instead, she presented Sam and me online her educated guess as to how it must have worked. I give full credit to this explanation to Zilin Cui. She first made this point:

As for "Middlebury", Zilin goes on to say:

I'd like to rephrase and restate Zilin's point here, and perhaps extend it a bit. The closest phonetic interpretation of Middlebury is mideboli, or 米德博里, where the four syllables actually appear as four. The consonants M-D-L-B-R appear as M-D-B-L, which is close. But the meaning is garbage, and it tends to be too long for a single name (without even including "College").

So somewhere along the way—perhaps the Middlebury Chinese School—twiddled with the name. What they ended up with is very interesting. First, they took only the first syllable MID(D). This alone is very clever, since campus slang sometimes shortens Middlebury to "Midd" anyway, as in "How did Midd do in the rankings?" Then they further disassembled the syllable to just MI, and chose mìng, 明, followed by D[D], represented by de 德. How clever is that? I would humbly modify Zilin's translation of that just slightly to "enlightened virtue", which is indeed a great alter ego for a college.

Finally, Zilin spoke to the "college" versus "university" issue:

I understand Zilin's point, but while calling Middlebury College a university / daxué / 大学 is technically inaccurate, if doing so makes it better understood what Middlebury's mission is, so be it. After all, mìngde itself is close, but technically inaccurate as well.

mìngde daxué    Take another look at the hànzi that form mìngde daxué: 明德大学 While I am no speaker of Mandarin, let alone an expert on the subject, we can all get more familiar, as dilettantes, with some of these characters. It'll be especially easy if you've reviewed 2009/31, but even if you haven't, I'll bring some of it back here to make it easier. First let's look at the four hànzi, then find why three of them are particularly easy to remember.

明 mìng – "bright, light, brilliant" (think of the Ming Dynasty with its famous Ming vases); extend the "light" to "enlightened"; this is our first easy character (see below)

德 dé - "virtue"

明德 mìngdé – "bright virtue", or better, "enlightened virtue"

大 dà - "big"; the easiest character here, since it's based on 人 ren (see below)

学 xué – "learn, study; school"; look at the bottom part that looks like a 7; it's the character 子 zǐ – "child", and the three short strokes at the top indicate knowledge coming down to the child.

大学 dàxué - "big school", that is, "university", and hence:

As I was writing this, I realized that two of the characters were actually old friends from 2009/31, and to show that, I'll recopy of a bit of that posting after all. They involve hànzi that are actually recognizable pictograms. Here's the background:

Chinese writing doesn’t use circles, so stretch your imagination to picture a square sun. Let’s interpret why there’s a bar across the center. Could it be the horizon? In Mandarin it’s read as ri.

I’ll admit, this one gave me pause for a moment. But first, realize that it’s based on the character for "sun", so you know you’re going in the right direction with something in the sky. Then notice that the left stroke has that charming curve, which is surely the division of dark and light on the half-moon. This one’s a little more of a stretch, but has its own logic. It’s yuè in Mandarin.

Combine both the sun and the moon, squeeze them together to fit a bit better, and things are as bright (mìng) as you could want. Now realize that this old friend is also the first symbol in mingde.

The other easy one is a bit more problematic. This is as far as I got in this other matter in the earlier posting:

This character is an actual pictogram representing a person. I see two legs and a head. It’s as close to a stick figure as you can reasonably expect. I’m advised it corresponds to the Mandarin word rén, and would therefore correspond to the English word person. Remember it’s language-neutral, so it corresponds to whatever the Cantonese, or Japanese word would be that would go with this character.

I would have sworn that I'd used the variation on this character in the earlier posting. I knew it at the time, but I apparently did not get to use it. So we'll reconstruct it here. It also has its charm.

Take the character for "person", add a pair of arms, and have it stretch out its arms to show how "big" something is. This in Mandarin is dà. So now look again at the four characters for mingde daxue and see if they seem more familiar.

Note: the last two characters above are the same (university~institute) as in the Harbin Institute of Technology, where the word order would more accurately be Harbin Technology Institute:

All in all, three of the four characters in mìngde daxué (though not the associated words) can now easily be remembered and recognized, as they are among the few characters that are still pictographic in nature.

zhōngwén xuéxiào    One last point on this matter. We said above that we'd still talk about the name of Middlebury's Chinese School, 中文学校 / zhōngwén xuéxiào. We can also make a couple of interesting points about the characters here.

You first have to be aware, either from the earlier posting, or because you knew it, of what the Chinese call their country. It's not China, which is a foreign name. It's called what's usually translated as the Middle Kingdom, a name I'm sure going back millennia. As to why, your guess is as good as mine, though we can reflect that both Japan and India are also ancient countries, so perhaps China considered itself in the middle of these two. Just speculation.

But again, we have to go back to the old posting to find one of the easiest characters to remember:

I'll say again that this is another one of my favorites because of its simplicity. The vertical line goes right down the middle of the rectangle, and couldn’t make a clearer statement. The corresponding Mandarin word is zhōng (keep in mind: ZH is one of the CH-type sounds).

Now take note of these two combinations of characters:

On the left, the second symbol, 国 (guó), is "country, kingdom", and so that's the Chinese name for China, the Middle Kingdom, zhōngguó. (See note below about Germany.)

On the right, the second symbol, 文 (wén), is "[written] language", so we now have, rather charmingly, the "Middle Language", zhōngwén, or "[the] Chinese [language]".

In this pair, we return to 学, xué, the child with knowledge raining down, so that's "learn, study; school". The second character, 校 xiào is "school, college, university". I can only assume using both intensifies the meaning so that a xuéxiào is a "learning school" or "school school". So Middlebury's Chinese School would be the:

Or, in Pinyin, the zhōngwén xuéxiào, with two symbols that should be easily memorable.

What's in a nym?    The above is all that I felt was pressing for this intermezzo, but I have additional language-related items, which group together under this question.

Shakespeare had Juliet ask "What's in a name?" I'll paraphrase that and ask "What's in a nym?" I'm referring to the numerous words like homonym, synonym, and antonym that end with this suffix. However, I did come across a slight bump in the road. I've always seen these words as a prefix plus the suffix nym: homo+nym. However, research says that's close, "but no cigar". The suffix comes from Ancient Greek ὄνυμα (ónuma)—which does indeed mean "name". But that means, to my consternation, that the O is part of the suffix as -onym! Bummer.

Actually, it seems there's some overlapping: the prefix homo- ends in an O (as in homogenize) and the suffix –onym starts in an O, so they overlap to yield homonym. That's evidently the case, but I suspect most people understand it this way: the prefix is homo- and the suffix is –nym, and that's the way we'll be looking at these words here.

I put together a list of several interesting words ending in nym, a few of them very common, others less so, but fun to know about. To check on the possibilities, I found on Wikipedia a list of 48 such words, mostly quite erudite, but it lacked a favorite, retronym, so there may be even more out there.

Let's start simply, with words we learned in school. With a prefix that means "same", a synonym is a word with the same, or nearly same, meaning as another: start, begin, commence, initiate, are all synonyms of one another. With a prefix that means "opposite", an antonym is a word that means the opposite, or nearly opposite, of a given word. Pairs of antonyms are hot/cold, large/small, even synonym/antonym. (I remember what a high school English teacher at Brooklyn Tech told us, that there are no true synonyms or antonyms—they are all approximate, and knowing now what I know, I fully agree. You might use "big" and "large" differently, even though they are nominally synonyms. Nothing in this world is perfect!)

I find the word acronym a bit problematic. The prefix means "high, height" as in "acrophobia", the fear of height, or in the Acropolis (with a stress shift to the O), the "High City". But when we say BP is the acronym for British Petroleum, there's nothing high about it—letters are being taken from up front. I'll continue to use the word, but I find it much better to talk about NATO, UK, USA being "initialisms", a much better word. But no one listens to me.

With a prefix that means "people" (as in "democracy"), a demonym names a person from a place. Many of them come relatively easily (though not always!), like Parisian, Berliner, San Franciscan, but some are irregular. The demonym for people from Oxford is Oxonian and for Liverpool is Liverpudlian. The demonym for a resident of Moscow is Muscovite, and for a Cairo resident it's Cairene. Then there are those places that have entirely different words for their demonyms. For a resident of Rio de Janeiro, the demonym is Carioca. The word comes from the indigenous Tupi language, which was a native tribe who lived near the small Carioca River that runs through Rio. And while we're in South America, the residents of Buenos Aires are called Porteños "people of the port", which acknowledges the importance of the port of Buenos Aires to the city and country.

A word like pseudonym is easy, because it comes up a lot. With a prefix meaning "fake", a pseudonym is a fake name: Mark Twain is the pseudonym of Samuel Clemens. But a favorite is the one that wasn't on the earlier list, retronym, with a prefix meaning "back". The description of a retronym sounds complex, but an example makes it very easy: An item has a newer version invented, with a modified name. So how do you distinguish it from the original? For instance, the guitar has existed for centuries. In the 20C the electric guitar was invented. So how do you complete the sentence "Do you play the electric guitar or the ___?" You need a retronym, a clearer, updated name for the original, and so the retronym "acoustic guitar" was coined. It doesn't eliminate the original name, and is just an alternate, to be used when needed.

Clocks, with their round-face dials, have long existed. Then the digital clock was invented with its digital readout, and with it followed the retronym "analog clock" or "analog clock face (or dial)" for the original version. But my favorite retronym is this: For all of the 20C the phone has existed, on the desk or on the wall. Then the mobile phone (or cell phone) was invented, after which followed the retronym "landline" for the item on the wall. I think this one is particularly clever, since "landline" doesn't even use the word "phone" at all.

Sometimes these words develop first in their adjectival form, but then the core of the word is also developed as a so-called "back-formation". For instance, anonymous developed first, and only later came the back-formation "anonym". But let's start there, anyway. The negative prefix a-, as in "amoral" or "asexual", appears as an- before a vowel, hence an anonym is a "no-name". But that's almost never used. Instead we use the adjective and say an author is anonymous, or the adverb, saying the story is written anonymously. But do notice the stress shift to the O in the longer forms: a.NO.ni.mis.

Another back-formation is "eponym" from the adjective eponymous (again with the stress shift to and from the O), a rarer, and somewhat more abstract concept. It's based on the prefix epi- "above, over". It's when something is named after a person (think of the person hovering over his or her namesake). For instance, in electricity, the watt is the eponym of James Watt. You can talk about Robinson Crusoe being the eponymous hero of the novel by JM Barrie. (Actually, in this case, you can look at it either way: the character is the eponym of the book title, or the book title is the eponym of the character.) Librarians talk about Melvil Dewey and his eponymous Dewey Decimal System. Sometimes the eponym takes on a suffix. To mesmerize includes the eponym of Franz Mesmer. Or it can be part of a portmanteau word: a gerrymander includes the eponym of Elbridge Gerry combined with "salamander" to describe highly irregular election districts. You can find eponyms hither, thither, and yon.

Probably patronymic is more common than "patronym", so that, too, is likely a back-formation. In either case, the prefix refers to a father, so it's the use of a father's name. We discussed that topic thoroughly in 2012/19, as it used to be used in English (Johnson, Peterson), is still normal in Russian as a middle name (Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky's name is telling you that he's the son of Ilya) and extremely common in Iceland, which in some ways is most interesting, since it's the LAST NAME that works patronymically: a man named Jón will have a son whose last name is Jónsson—not too surprising—and a daughter whose last name is Jónsdóttir. Add to that that the father's last name would reflect HIS father, and the mother's HER father, the family of four will all have different last names. Reread that posting. In addition, we bring up the situation where a single mother raises a child with no father present. No problem. The Icelandic child will then use a matonymic!

Let's get back to homonym. The prefix means "same", so a pair of homonyms have the same written form, but different meanings as in: It was right to turn right. The dogs bark as they scratch the bark of the tree. The Pole raised the flag on the pole. It took a long time to get well after he fell in the well. Do you have the current statistics about the river's current?

In German: Mein Haus ist in Frankfurt am Main (My (mein) house is in Frankfurt am Main (Main [River]). Rainer is a man's name; rein is "pure" and reiner is "purer".

In French: J'achetais de la foie dans la ville de Foix pour la seconde fois. (I bought some liver in the city of Foix for the second time.) FWA is the pronunciation for foie (liver), Foix ([city name]), and fois (time).

In Spanish: El papa comió la papa (The dad ate the potato)-notice the el/la gender difference. El Papa is also the Pope.

A heteronym, with a prefix meaning "opposite", involves words that have two differences, not just one like with homonyms. Heteronyms once again have the same written form, but this time, not only do they have different meanings, as above, but they have different pronunciations as well, as in: It was time to present the present. The farm was used to produce produce. The insurance was invalid for the invalid. They got some Polish workers to polish the furniture. A picture of a swimming bass was painted on the bass drum. He shed a tear when he saw the tear in his Porsche's upholstery. The wind was strong enough to wind the windmill. Excuse me while I think of an excuse. The mark was so minute, it took me a minute to find it.

In German: modern stressed on the second syllable is "modern", but stressed on the first it's "to moulder".
In French: fils, pronounced to rhyme with "feel" is "wires"; pronounced to rhyme with "fleece (minus the L), is "son(s)".
In Swedish: You may recall from earlier discussions that a bana in Swedish is a "path, route", just like German Bahn in "Autobahn". The plural is banan, and is also stressed on the first syllable. But stressed on the second syllable, banan is "banana". It's BAA.nan versus ba.NAAN.

As for mononym, it's a totally new word I just learned that I find very handy. With a prefix meaning "one" (as in "monotheism, monosyllabic"), it refers to people known by "one name", such as Cleopatra, Napoleon, and Cher, who are all known by their mononyms.

Putting a little thought into the concept of famous names, you have to reject surnames as being considered mononyms. Beethoven, Tchaikovsky, Goya, Churchill, and Kennedy are simply the surnames, and is how we refer to many of the famous. It also occurs to me that some well-known people are usually referred to by their entire name. If you talk about Gertrude Stein, you always use her full name, at least on the first reference. You might say Stein only later in the discussion. For Hollywood figures, you use last names for Cagney and Bogart, but if I said Wayne or Davis, you wouldn't know, on first reference, that I was talking about John Wayne or Bette Davis, who are usually referred to by their full names. On the other hand, the nickname Bogie for Bogart is probably a mononym.

Mononyms appear frequently when talking about the ancients, who only had one name to begin with: Homer, Euripides, Aesop, Plato, Ulysses, Nero. Cleopatra is a mononym, but Mark Anthony or Julius Caesar are not. Most biblical names are mononyms: Esther, Noah, Paul, Lazarus, Herod. Pocahontas and Geronimo are mononyms. Voltaire, Molière, Colette, too. Tutankhamun would seem to have two mononyms, since he also has the nickname King Tut. Which brings us to kings, emperors, and popes. All adopt mononyms, which are almost never their real names. Since the same mononyms are often repeated ad infinitum, they have to be numbered: King George III, King Louis XIV, Tsar Alexander III, Pope Pius XII.

Modern celebrities have gotten onto the mononym bandwagon. Sometimes their mononym is based on their given name: Elvis, Beyoncé, Madonna, Cher, Adele, Usher, Prince; or on their middle name: Rihanna, Drake; or on their surname: Liberace, Montovani; or their nickname: Sting, Bono.

Mononyms in the art world include Michaelangelo and Titian (Tiziano), known by their first names. Some used nicknames. The artist considered Spanish, though born in Greece, had a lengthy Greek name, and so was called by the mononym El Greco, The Greek. The Venetian artist whose last name really was Canal, but who was also known for painting numerous scenes of Venice with its canals, is known by the nickname Canaletto, a mononym.

And then there's the interesting matter of locator names. We do that all the time: "I don't mean Bob next door, I mean Bob from Boston"—and "Bob from Boston" might then actually end up the way local friends start referring to him. That happened in the Renaissance all the time. For instance Raphael (Raffaello) is the mononym of Raffaello Sanzio da Urbino. Sanzio was his surname, but added on is "da Urbino", indicating that he was from Urbino. On the other hand, the artist known by the mononym Giotto was actually Giotto di Bondone. In that case, he did not have a surname, but did have a locator name saying that he was from Bondone. And this brings us to two interesting cases.

We use the mononym Rembrandt, though many have heard him called Rembrandt van Rijn (rhymes with "rain"), indicating that he was "from [the] Rhine". I've heard it suggested that "van Rijn" was his surname, but it wasn't—it's just a locator name. His full name was Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn, so his surname was actually Harmenszoon.

Now I only got into the Rembrandt story in order to contrast with my main point, which involves Leonardo da Vinci—and that is his entire name. Vinci is a little Tuscan town just west of central Florence, so clearly "da Vinci" is merely a locator name. But this point is that English, in contrast to apparently all other European languages, looks upon this individual differently. I noticed that when hoofing through Italian museums, and the Louvre, where indicators kept on showing references to works by "Leonardo", using it as a mononym. Only then did I realize that English doesn't do that, and perhaps not all English speakers would recognize who's being referred to by just calling him Leonardo. English speakers either use the whole name, Leonardo da Vinci, or—very oddly—use his locator name, da Vinci, as though it were a surname. If you're unsure of that, just look at Dan Brown's well-known book "The Da Vinci Code"--it's not called "*The Leonardo Code". If you don't see how odd using his locator name really is, just try to hypothetically do the same thing to Rembrandt, and say that "The Night Watch" was painted by van Rijn.

We now return to exonym and endonym, a pair of opposites—antonyms—that we discussed in the past. I get the feeling that, once they've learned their geography, people get complacent and parochial, with an attitude that they know the names of countries around the world, and that's that. But in 2009/33, we had a great time talking about the difference between this pair of words that indicate an external name versus an internal name. It's something else you may like to review. But again, we can do a bit of that here and perhaps extend it a bit.

Actually, we just saw this contrast again in China. That name, with its variations in several languages, (Chine, Kina) is an exonym for that country, used only externally (and derived from the name of Emperor Qin of the Qin Dynasty [pronounced CHIN]). The endonym, as we saw, was that the country is called the Middle Kingdom, 中国, zhōngguó. As for "Japan", with variations in several languages including the Italian Giappone, the endonym, what locals themselves call their country, is Nippon, and the people are Nipponese.

Don't be concerned—most names are recognizable. Everyone will recognize variations like Italia, España, Belgique/België, and most others. But the endonym for Finland is Suomi, for Wales is Cymru, Greece is Ελλάδα /Ellada (though historically Ελλάς / Hellas)—but we recognize both because we also have the word "Hellenic". The endonym for Egypt is Miṣr, and there are several others like that pointed out in that earlier posting. But the situation for "Germany" is particularly unusual, and worth pursuing on its own.

Names for Germany    There are numerous names for Germany, possibly because of its central location. They are primarily exonyms, but the system is odd in this case. We pointed the names out in the earlier posting, but now I have a map that shows the situation even better. Instead of linking to it directly, I'll give you the link so you can study it more easily:

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/4/44/Germany_Name_European_Languages.svg/1000px-Germany_Name_European_Languages.svg.png

Where to start? This unique situation is counter to all exonym/endonym explanations, but let's start with the groups of names that are clearly exonyms.

G-NAMES: These names starting in G go back to the classical languages, Latin Germania (G as in "go") and Greek Γερμανία (also Germania, but stress the I: ger.ma.NI.a). The word merely described the fertile land north of the Alps. It was likely the Gauls who first used it, and it was later adopted by the Romans, attested to in the writings of Julius Caesar, to use for tribes in northeastern Gaul. The Germanic tribes did not use it at all.

Look at the dark green on the map, south-central first. Italy and Greece, as the successors to the classical names, use it (but in Italian, the G is as in "gin"). It's used all across the Indo-European subfamilies, in Albanian, Macedonian, Bulgarian, and Romanian. But then in the east, Russian (also Bulgarian) uses it as Германия, with the G as in "go" again. Armenian seems to use it as well.

Jumping west, we find something unique about how English uses it. English is the only language that drops the final A, while also moving the stress to the first syllable, quite unusual. Then, since English spelling frequently avoids a final I, it replaces it with a Y, to yield "Germany". (Compare how, when you drop the plural ending –ES from a word like "ladies", English abhors the final I and turns it into a Y in the singular "lady".) And note the Celtic language versions in Ireland, Scotland, and the Isle of Man.

A-NAMES: The area covering Switzerland, parts of Baden-Württemberg in Germany, and Alsace in France was once home to the Germanic Alemanni tribe. Today, varieties of German in this area are still called Alemannic dialects. In the 19C, two spellings competed, one with one L (which won out) based on the early Latin spelling, and one with two Ls, based on etymology, since the name was derived from something like alle Männer ("all men/people"). In any case, the name Alemanni gave rise to the names for Germany in southwestern Europe (in yellow), starting with Allemagne in France (the successor to the Gauls), to Alemania in Spanish, and similarly in Portuguese, Catalan, and even (non-related) Basque. But the surprise is that it hopped the Mediterranean to be used in Arabic, and in Turkish. Actually, the fact that a variant is used in Welsh (with a definite article) is less surprising when you realize that neighboring English originally used "Almain" (from French) for Germany, with "German" attested to only as of 1520.

S-NAMES: While still talking about Germanic tribes, we can now refer to the Saxons in Germany (some of whom joined with the Angles to become Anglo-Saxons.) This tribal name resulted in the names for Germany in Finnish Saksa and Estonian Saksamaa (in red). Remember that Finnish and Estonian are not Indo-European, but in the Finno-Ugric family, so they are related to each other (and distantly, to Hungarian), and otherwise, to languages in Siberia.

V-NAMES: Continuing down the Baltic, we come to Latvia and Lithuania, which are their own sub-group of the Indo-European language family and have names for Germany (in light green) that start with V. However, while there are several theories as to the origin of these words, nothing definite has been decided.

N-NAMES: In Eastern Europe, there are a set of names in N (in purple) that cover most Slavic languages (but not Russian, Bulgarian, or Macedonian), and oddly, also include Hungarian, which is related to Asian languages (see above.) The origin of these names has been hypothesized as going back to a Proto-Slavic word *němьcь, which has as its base a word meaning "mute, not able to speak". It was originally applied to any non-Slavs, who "could not speak (like us)", but was then narrowed down just to speakers of German. We can start with Polish Niemcy, continue with Belarusian and Ukrainian to its east, then down through Czech and Slovak, then Hungarian, which obviously borrowed its name from its Slavic neighbors, to the countries of the former Yugoslavia, such as Croatia and Serbia.

D/T-NAMES: All five of the above are obviously exonyms, used outside the German area to refer to Germany. But we'll now see that the endonym, used internally, is problematic. We can go back to a Proto-Germanic word, *Þeudiskaz, remembering that the letter thorn (Þ) is like a TH. Take note of the EU and of the SK. The word meant "belonging to the people". This developed into Old High German diutisc (which continued the SK sounds) and then to modern Deutsch, combining into Deutschland. That would seem to end the story until we look at the map for the areas in blue. For starters, the Dutch (Netherlanders) say Duitsland, and the Luxemburgers Däitschland. But these are still West Germanic languages (as is English).

When we move to Scandinavia to the North Germanic languages, we might feel confused. When I first went to Sweden and learned that the German language was tysk and the country Tyskland, I couldn't imagine that. But look across to Denmark and Norway, then to the Faroe Islands, and Iceland, and we see that a variation in T or in thorn (Þ) is normal, and historic. So is the ending in SK.

But now we come to our dilemma about the D/T-names in blue. If "Deutsch" is an endonym, just used internally, how do we explain all the other external languages using related words? I say we can't. While there are five true exonyms (with their variations), the D/T-names are a unique situation where an endonym also functions as an exonym. Shall we coin a new word and say we're dealing with a "pseudo-endonym"? While the spread of the root can be explained historically, it's still very strange.

And it gets stranger. In my research on Chinese above, I came across this tidbit. The combination of characters 德意志 would be meaningless as described earlier, except for the fact that the corresponding sounds in pinyin are dé + yì + zhì (remember ZH=CH), so the three together, déyìzhì, is an approximation of "Deutsch". However, that's usually shortened to just the first character, 德 dé, reminiscent of a D, a function it also serves for the D[D] in Midd[lebury]. Adding the familiar 国 guó "country" yields 德国 déguó for "Germany". The oddity here is that, by using the short form with just the D, what is actually being said is D-Land for Germany. I see that Japanese and Korean do similar things. So now the "pseudo-endonym" stretches across Eurasia to East Asia.

Overlapping    But even within Europe, there's overlapping between the six kinds of names.

(1) While Russian uses Германия / Germania for the country, a German is a немец / nemets (male) or a немка / nemka (female), and the language (and adjective) is немецкий / nemetskii. Thus Russian straddles G-names and N-names.

(2) While Italian also uses Germania for the country, the language, adjective, and inhabitant is tedesco, so we see an overlapping of G-names and D/T-names. Look closely and you'll see that tedesco is really "Deutsch" and has the same T+SK structure that Swedish tysk has.

(3) While English uses Germany, the ancient Germans are still referred to as Teutons, with a Teutonic culture. Sometimes the word is used in an exaggerated way, referring to a Teutonic atmosphere in a German restaurant. English also uses "Dutch", a word that originally did refer to "Deutsch", but then with shifting of meanings, was moved over one Germanic country to the west to refer to the Netherlanders instead. The term "Pennsylvania Dutch" referring to the German-Americans living there is proof of this, as was the "Dutchtown" reference to Kleindeutschland in NYC. Thus, English, too, overlaps G-words with D/T-words.

(4) In Germany, everyone recognizes the term "Germania" (G as in "go") not only as the old Latin reference to Germany but even more so, as a reference to the goddess figure Germania that symbolizes the country, comparable to Britannia in the UK and Columbia in the US. We will be talking in the next posting about the Germania building in Over the Rhine in Cincinnati that has a statue of Germania in its façade, and what happened to it during the hysteria. But the point is that even in Germany, there's an overlapping of a G-name with the D/T-names.

Ashkenaz    There's one last point that's just too good to leave out. In medieval Hebrew, Germany was referred to as אַשְׁכְּנַז (Ashkenaz). Originally, Ashkenaz—a mononym--was a person, the grandson of Noah. In rabbinic literature, the kingdom of Ashkenaz (the person) was associated early on with several regions, but starting in the 11C, it was associated with Germany, most precisely with the Rhineland, and Ashkenaz was thought to be the ancestor of the Germans. In time, the Kingdom of Ashkenaz was considered instead to be a place, deemphasizing the individual. Thus the Jewish culture that developed in the Rhineland—Ashkenaz—was referred to by the adjective Ashkenazi, as were the people (compare with the –I suffix in Iraqi, Israeli, Pakistani). That form in -I is the only form of the term in use today, to describe Ashkenazi Jews, that is, Jews whose culture and language (Yiddish) hark back to Germany, then spreading to Eastern Europe.

Yiddish, which simply means "Jewish" in Yiddish, developed in the 9C based on High German, but has added elements of Hebrew, Aramaic, plus Slavic and Latinate languages. Yiddish, or Judeo-German, is the only Germanic language not written in the Latin alphabet. It's written using the Hebrew alphabet, though fully vocalized (all vowels included, in variance with Hebrew and Arabic practice.)

Sepharad    It's worthwhile completing the story of the other side of the coin. There's a place mentioned only once in the Bible (Obadiah 1:20) called סְפָרַד (Sepharad), of uncertain location. Since the 2C, Spanish Jews gave the name Sepharad to the Iberian Peninsula, specifically Spain, and, dropping the second A, called themselves Sephardi, once again with the –I suffix. Their descendants are called Sephardi Jews, or more commonly, Sephardic Jews. The language that developed from Old Spanish is called Ladino (literally, "Latin"), or Judeo-Spanish, and is a Latinate language, just as Spanish is, but its speakers are scattered across the Mediterranean, due to the 1492 Expulsion from Spain. Ladino is today usually written in the Latin alphabet.