Naming is ownership. Alas, language can easily be manipulated. Nuance and context are often missing. Is it the Falklands or the Maldives, Taiwan or Chinese Taipei, Derry or Londonderry? Typically, the answer lies on which side of a border one lives, supercharged by national pride. Lake Ontario was named from the Wendat word “Ontari’io” over four centuries ago, long before the United States or Canada were formed. Indeed, much of our problems with names stem from past colonization.

For more than two centuries, Westerners referred to the Chinese capital as Peking, now called Beijing throughout the English-speaking world since 1979, when the Chinese government started to encourage the pinyin system of converting Mandarin into the Latin alphabet rather than the earlier Chinese Postal Map rendering, itself derived from an eighteenth-century British method. British colonialism also renamed Bombay in 1661, part translating the previous colonial Portuguese name Bom Bahia (“good bay”). In 1995, the newly elected local Shiv Sena-BJP coalition government restored the name Mumbai at its first cabinet meeting, named for the city’s goddess Mumba, a local incarnation of the Hindu deity Parvati.

“Indian” has wrongly been used to collectively name Indigenous inhabitants of the Americas since Europeans began arriving from the late fifteenth century. Perpetuated in modern minds by countless Hollywood westerns, the naming makes no sense, attributed to the poor navigational skills of Cristóbal Colón (a.k.a. Christopher Columbus), who wrongly believed he and his crew had circumnavigated the globe. Colón may or may not have come from Catalonia (Catalunya/Cataluña/Catalonha) as the Spanish royalty of the time – Colón’s benefactors Isabel and Fernando – wanted the world to believe. Native American, First Nations, or Indigenous tribal names are all appropriate, such as the Huron-Wendat First Nation, from whose language we get Ontario, meaning “big beautiful lake.”

“Eskimo” is also a derogatory European naming for over 150,000 Inuit, who mostly live in northern Canada and Greenland, millennia before Europeans ever transited the Atlantic Ocean in large numbers. Indigenous words can be hard to translate into other languages, especially with numerous local dialects (Inuktitut syllabics are now part of the million-symbol Unicode text encoding system, along with Cherokee, Cree, and other Indigenous languages). Given the harsh polar conditions, there are also many Inuit names for snow and ice. As noted in the Canadian Encyclopaedia, one sinks in maujaq, while ilusaq is a building material. Unfortunately, because of global warming there is less siku sea ice every year, for which there are “no fewer than 93 different words.” Preserving a language is as hard as stopping the shrinking albedo in the Arctic, now at its lowest level because of increasing greenhouse gases.

In his 1980 play Translations, Irish dramatist Brian Friel wrote about the problems English ordnance surveyors had in converting local Gaelic place names to English, for example, Cnoc Ban as a similar-sounding Knockban instead of the translated Fair Hill. When the local translator Owen states, “A new map is being made of the whole country,” the assigned British cartographer Captain Lancey replies “Is that all?” Later on, Owen wonders about how to translate Bun na hAbhann, noting that Bun (bottom) and Abha (river) signify “mouth of the river,” but he gives up when no suitable English sounds can be found, stating, “We are trying to denominate and at the same time describe that tiny area of soggy, rocky, sandy ground where that little stream enters the sea, an area known locally as Bun na hAbhann… Burnfoot! What about Burnfoot?” All the while, the Irish language was banned, kept alive by local “hedge schools” that took place in secret, away from foreign administrative eyes. The first performance was in Derry, a name accepted by everyone other than the British government.

Language oddities arise in any translation. The city of Baltimore, Maryland, is named for the first Lord Baltimore, an English politician living in Longford, Ireland, who took his ennobled name as was customary from a coastal village, and whose son was the first proprietor of Maryland. Baltimore is the anglicized name of Baile an Tí Mhóir in West Cork, meaning “the town of the big house,” while the original Irish name is Dún na Séad, meaning “fort of the jewels.” One dual-language name is hard enough. Maybe it has to do with the thrice-distilled Irish whiskey, derived from uisce beatha, literally “water of life.”

Whether Baltimore came from Baile an Tí Mhóir or vice versa, few locals today are bothered, although some place names have been painted over in larger Irish-speaking regions, such as road signs in Kerry, Ireland, where the unpopular official Irish “An Daingean” has been overwritten with the more common anglicized Dingle to suit tourist interests. New signs are now bilingual. Conversely, in Asturias, northern Spain, road signs have been defaced to support a vanishing minority local language, for example, the last syllable of the capital Oviedo marked up to read Uviéu in Asturiano or the Spanish “g” and “j” crossed-out with the letter “x” to indicate Xixón instead of Gijón, Asturias’s most populous city. In some cases, bilingual signs are now in use.

Ontario began using French translations beside or below English on federal government road signage in the 1970s without much backlash, perhaps even helping the predominantly anglophone population to understand Canada’s co-official language, for example, the four directions nord/sud/est/ouest. In the next-door francophone-majority province of Quebec, the 1977 Bill 101 enshrined the French language in law rather than bilingualism, banning English-only signs to help the francophone community from being swallowed in a majority English-speaking North American continent.

The law is not dissimilar to Canadian Content rules for music that supports Canadian artists within a wider American cultural market (as of 1999, 35% of broadcast songs must be Canadian). Bill 101’s goal was to preserve French-Canadian culture, although some companies, notably the Bank of Montreal and the Royal Bank, moved their headquarters from Montreal to Toronto, while pointed debates added to separatist tensions, resulting in a narrowly defeated 1995 Parti Québécois referendum.

In August of this year, French language rights were cited as one of the reasons for the failure of US-Canada trade talks, with the Charter of the French Language – a.k.a. Bill 101 or its amended Bill 96 – once again at the........

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