T Morris, in a comment to this post, asks why there are no English ‘translations’ of French place names, such as there are in other languages (Parigi in Italian) or as there are for English names in other languages (Rome rather than Roma).
In fact, there are English spellings of French place names that differ from the French originals, but they seem to be reducing in number over the years. We used always to write Lyons and Marseilles for Lyon and Marseille, and going further back in history, Calais used to be written as Calice. ‘The Jackdaw of Rheims‘ (one of the best-known Ingoldsby Legends) provides another example. As a (very) small child, I imagined that Dunkirk must be in Scotland, and Ushant never seemed to me to refer to a place in France (I think it is now usually seen in its French spelling – Ouessant).
The same thing is happening with other foreign place names – Saragossa is now usually Zaragoza, and Corunna has become La Coruña. As we travel more, we become aware that our spelling and pronunciation of foreign place names has got out of step with the native, and we adjust our version to make it more similar to the original. With spelling that is easy, but the pronunciation will still be an approximation, better or worse according to our individual ability to imitate, or willingness to do so. The changes take place particularly for those place names that have dropped out of our consciousness, and then come back to us – Flushing became Vlissingen when car ferries started to use the port more regularly, and Leghorn became Livorno when it became an easily accessible tourist resort.
The regions of France still retain their English names – Brittany, Normandy, Burgundy, Gascony show no signs of becoming Bretagne, Normandie, Bourgogne or Gascogne.
If we turn the question around, it seems odd that the French have so few spellings of their own for place names in the British Isles – after all, (Norman) French was the language of government in England for about three hundred years. I can find a handful – Londres, Douvres, Cantorbéry, Edimbourg, Cornouailles, Tamise (the Thames), and the names of the constituent parts of the islands – Angleterre, Ecosse, Pays de Galles, and Irlande, plus Grande Bretagne itself. The French pronunciation of English place names without different spellings is, however, just as gallicized as our pronunciation of French names is anglicized – as is to be expected.
June 11, 2009 at 10:43 pm
And don’t forget Agincourt, which those zany Frogs call Azincourt.
But what might be going on is English people *thinking* they can pronounce French….
August 19, 2009 at 1:47 pm
But Genova is still Genoa for Brits, I think.
August 21, 2009 at 6:31 am
I should also have included Florence (Firenze), Naples (Napoli), Milan (Milano), Rome (Roma), Turin (Torino) and Venice (Venezia).
I’ll shut up now.
August 24, 2009 at 1:28 pm
Is there a good reason why Encyclopædia Britannica’s Biography of the Day has just altered the anglicization of Yasser Arafat to Ysir ‘Araft? (Especially when the text in Encyclopædia Britannica’s online article still has the “missing” letter a’s in?)
March 21, 2010 at 5:14 pm
One loss too far, for me, is Andalusia, a beautiful and long-standing Anglicisation, which in print now often appears in the Spanish form of Andalucía (the Rough Guide and Lonely Planet books on the region being leading examples). I adjudge this to be a specimen of politico-linguistic correctness, i.e., that the users of this form think it is “more correct” and more polite to use the Spanish form and that the Anglicised form is somehow wrong and rude.
Then they have to invent a new adjective, because ‘Andalusian” is beyond the pale for them, so they come up with ‘Andalucian’, or even more absurdly in some cases, ‘Andalucían’, a word which does not exist in Spanish, where the only adjective is ‘andaluz’. You then get people saying this non-Spanish word ‘Andalucian’ with a Spanish proununciation, the ‘c’ pronounced as the ‘th’ in the English word ‘bath’, the stress put on the ‘i’.
Meanwhile, in France, Italy and Germany, ‘Andalousie’, ‘Andalusia’ and ‘Andalusien’ continue in sublime defiance, or blissful ignorance, of Anglo silliness.