UNITED NATIONS Working Paper GROUP OF EXPERTS ON No. 1 GEOGRAPHICAL NAMES Twenty-fifth session Nairobi, 5–12 May 2009 Item 15 of the provisional agenda Activities relating to the Working Group on Exonyms The Nature of the Endonym * * Prepared by Paul Woodman (United Kingdom), Permanent Committee on Geographical Names. THE NATURE OF THE ENDONYM ABSTRACT The endonym is the basic toponymic exemplar and as such it needs to be understood properly. To do so we need to appreciate the context of space and place that produces it. Most endonyms arise from the elemental human relationship with space and place, and possess an intrinsic and enduring value which cannot normally be either bestowed or removed by political arbitrariness. ____________ BACKGROUND The United Nations Working Group on Exonyms was established within the United Nations Group of Experts on Geographical Names (UNGEGN) in 2002, by resolution 4 of the Eighth United Nations Conference on the Standardization of Geographical Names. The wording of the resolution is: VIII/4. Working Group on Exonyms of the United Nations Group of Experts on Geographical Names The Conference, Recalling resolutions 28, 29, 31 and 38 of the Second United Nations Conference on the Standardization of Geographical Names, resolutions 18 and 19 of the Third Conference, resolution 20 of the Fourth Conference and resolution 13 of the Fifth Conference, as well as resolutions 4 and 10 of the First Conference, resolution 35 of the Second Conference, resolution 7 of the Third Conference and resolution 4 of the Fourth Conference, Noting that, notwithstanding the general goal of limiting the use of exonyms, in several countries there has been a tendency to increase their number, Recognizing that measures such as the categorization of exonym use, the publication of pronunciation guides for endonyms, and the formulation of guidelines ensuring a politically sensitive use of exonyms would help in the reduction of the number of exonyms, Recommends the establishment of a Working Group on Exonyms of the United Nations Group of Experts on Geographical Names, with the aim of preparing such measures as those mentioned above.1 Upon establishment of the Working Group, it was immediately clear to the membership that its first task would be to define exactly what the word ‘exonym’ entailed, and in order to do so it would simultaneously be necessary to define the corresponding term ‘endonym’. After much deliberation the Working Group settled on the following definitions: Endonym: Name of a geographical feature in an official or well-established language occurring in that area where the feature is situated. Examples: Vārānasī (not Benares); Aachen (not Aix-la-Chapelle); Krung Thep (not Bangkok); Al-Uqşur (not Luxor). Exonym: Name used in a specific language for a geographical feature situated outside the area where that language is widely spoken, and differing in its form from the respective endonym(s) in the area where the 1 Eighth United Nations Conference on the Standardization of Geographical Names, Berlin, 27 August – 5 September 2002, United Nations, Dept of Economic and Social Affairs, 2003, Document E/CONF.94/3, available online in all six working languages of the UNGEGN – for the English language version see http://unstats.un.org/unsd/geoinfo/eighthuncsgn-english.pdf 2 geographical feature is situated. Examples: Warsaw is the English exonym for Warszawa (Polish); Mailand is German for Milano; Londres is French for London; Kūlūniyā is Arabic for Köln. The officially romanized endonym Moskva for Mocквa is not an exonym, nor is the Pinyin form Beijing, while Peking is an exonym. The United Nations recommends minimizing the use of exonyms in international usage.2 Even with these definitions available, however, there remains debate as to the precise nature of the endonym and the exonym, and it is the debate regarding the endonym that this present paper is designed to address. SPACE AND PLACE From time immemorial man has gazed at the night sky and wondered how and where he might truly be located in the universe, in the great scheme of things. The same sense of awe can overwhelm us in the daytime as we stand on a mountain top and view the distant horizons, as the pioneering British mountaineer Douglas Freshfield noted: ...the whole was vast and vague, wonderful and strange, creating an impression of immeasurable shining space, of the Earth as it might appear to a visitant from some other planet.3 Where exactly are we, where do we belong, and what is it that we are observing? And aside from likely feelings of human insignificance, is it a sense of space or a sense of place that takes hold of us at such moments; indeed is there in fact a difference between the two? Already in the fourth century BC the Greek philosophers Plato and Aristotle were writing of space (χωρα / chora) and place (τοπος / topos). By the first century AD the Roman mathematician and geographer Ptolemy had returned to the theme, dealing with space and place in a strictly scientific and unemotional manner, simply in terms of mathematically determined locations. By contrast, the Greek geographer Strabo, writing some hundred years earlier than Ptolemy, had dealt with place more artistically, using description to note the differences and similarities of landscapes and cultures4. Much later, the seventeenth century philosopher-scientists Descartes and Newton broached the same questions. For Descartes the two phenomena were of a different type; place was about position whilst space was about size and shape, area and volume. Newton considered the relationship between space and place to be hierarchical; place was a part of space. Einstein, as a specialist scientist, followed the Ptolemaic approach in being interested only in what he believed to be measurable and, considering space to be measurable, he spoke mainly of that. Since, as we shall see, it is for the most part place that we need to consider in our dealings with toponymy, the value of Einstein’s work to the present study is therefore necessarily limited. Indeed, when caught in Greenland by the type of all-consuming blizzard that renders inoperable many of our navigational senses, including sight, it is most certainly Newton rather than Einstein who needs to be our companion, as Peter Høeg graphically remarks from his experiences among the Inuit: No one has budged my or Newton’s certainty ... No one is going to find his way home to Qaanaaq with his nose stuck in Einstein’s writings.5 2 Glossary of Terms for the Standardization of Geographical Names: Addendum, United Nations, 16 November 2007, Document ST/ESA/STAT/SER.M/85/Add.1, 07-60262, available online in all six working languages of the UNGEGN – for the English language version see http://unstats.un.org/unsd/geoinfo/glossary_add/glossary_add_e.pdf 3 The view just shy of the summit of Koshtantau in the Caucasus (4303N 4312E), as recounted in Search and travel in the Caucasus, Douglas W Freshfield, Proceedings of the Royal Geographical Society & Monthly Record of Geography, Issue 12, No.5, 1890, p 258. 4 See Geography & Vision: Seeing, Imagining and Representing the World, Denis Cosgrove, I B Tauris, 2008, ISBN 9781850438472, pp 6-7. 5 Miss Smilla’s Feeling for Snow, Peter Høeg, translated from the Danish by F. David, HarperCollins, 1993, ISBN 0006547834, p 39. 3 The philosopher Wittgenstein frequently employed geographical and topographical language in his discourses, speaking of journeys, of the lie of the land, and of knowing one’s way about. In defining metapsychology in his 1915 work Das Unbewusste (The Unconscious), Sigmund Freud wrote of the topographical aspects of a psychic process, these being the aspects relevant to locating and identifying the specific junctures or places within our minds at which consciousness operates. Some four decades later, in La poétique de l’espace (The Poetics of Space), the French philosopher Gaston Bachelard posited that ...the life of the mind is given form in the places and spaces in which human beings dwell and those places themselves shape and influence human memories, feelings and thoughts.6 For philosophy and psychology regularly to use such terminology in helping to denote the concepts relevant to those disciplines is a remarkable testament to the importance of space and place in every aspect of our lives. Several writers in more recent years have also turned their attention to these same questions. Three of the most notable contributors to the subject have been Yi-Fu Tuan7, Jeff Malpas8, and Edward Relph9, all of whom agree that there is indeed a distinction to be made between space and place. In contrast to Einstein, Relph argues that space is in fact a somewhat shapeless concept: Space is amorphous and intangible and not an entity that can be directly described and analysed.10 In a highly important passage, Tuan agrees that space is the more nebulous of the two ideas: “Space” is more abstract than “place.” What begins as undifferentiated space becomes place as we get to know it better and endow it with value. ... The ideas “space” and “place” require each other for definition. From the security and stability of place we are aware of the openness, freedom, and threat of space, and vice versa. Furthermore, if we think of space as that which allows movement, then place is pause; each pause in movement makes it possible for location to be transformed into place.’11 By introducing movement and pause, Tuan here not only endorses the concept of space but further connects it with that of time, and this is a connection also noted by Malpas: One can thus talk of a ‘space of time’ ... German simply combines the term for space with that for time – Raum with Zeit – to arrive at a single term for such a ‘time-space’ – Zeitraum.12 The German language is of course adept at making such constructions – Zeitgeist is another example from a different sphere – and the word Zeitraum manages to encapsulate the time-space continuum more succinctly than is perhaps possible in other languages.