Renaming places is it necessary?

Question

In many countries including India (all of which got independence from European Powers) there is a tendency to change the name of places. Is it good or is just a gimmick to fool the people. Because it does not requie any resources and local people feel great about it.

Answer 1

excellent question...something which i have been asking all the time.in a country like india where there are myriads of tensions over so many dreadfully serious matters(like terrorism,crime,scams,poverty,illiteracy,corruption,bad governance,etc,etc) yet all these political people worry only about changing names of places..!
what good will that name change do? a lot of retyping/data typing/changing ,repainting of sign boards,maps and of course a lot of confusion for schoolkids in memorisation...
it is so grossly stupid and having no point at all.
of course it is just a political move to woo masses bcoz,as u said,the local people feel so great about it!
changing paces name is not good from any point of view,becoz whatever name a place has-it derives its identity and image from that only.
once mayawati changed the name of a hospital from king george medical college to something like chhatrapati shahuji vishwavidyalya and after some hot protest changed it back to KGMU.what a sheer waste of time and resourses...
bangalore,bombay,calcutta,mangalore,madras etc were good names enough but political drama has changed them and i would like to know how has this benefitted indian economy or progress...!

Answer 2

There are different cases. Many times it is an issue of emphasizing one part of the history of the place, the part that serves current political interests. Sometimes it is also a method for creating a false historical impression. But it can also be an issue of going back to an older name that was forbiden or changed by some external power.
In Greece it is common practice to remove names that may sound turkish and give ancient names even to places that have no ancient history. Its a way to safeguard them as Greek. However, locals still use the older name and that creates some confusion.

Answer 3

What is in a name? When you can define something, you are saying to everyone else that you and you alone are defining it - and dispossessing everyone else of that control.

Changing names might seem stupid to us, even childish - until you consider the emotional and political significance that these names mean.

For example, Australians used to call our most famous landmark - a giant hill near Alice Spring 'Ayers Rock' - named after the white Australian explorer who 'discovered it'.

However, the Aborigines - the natives of Australia who have been here for 40,000 years - a hell of a lot longer than any white man, have called the mountain 'Uluru'.

When white man 'discovered' it and called it Ayers rock, it was seen that white man was dispossessing the Aborigines of ownership of the land, and hence reinforcing the theory of Terra Nullis - that Aborigines did not show ownership of the land and therefore did not control it, had no right to it.

Another good example - St Petersburg, Russia. Named after Peter the Great, Russians changed the name to Petrograd (to get rid of the German sounding 'burg', and in 1917 Revolution the name was changed to 'Leningrad'.

And when communism fell, and the Russians wanted to forget the communist past, they re-named it St Petersburg.

A name is not just a word for a place - it has very strong emotional appeals and conotations for different generations in certain political, historical and social contexts.

Answer 4

It is a way of stating that the former times and inhabitants are gone. Keeping an old name gives legitimacy to previous rulers or inhabitants. For example Danzig was a German city in northern Poland but after World War 2 the Germans were expelled and the Poles re-named it to Gdansk. The same fate befell Koenigsburg in the former German state of East Prussia. It is now part of Russia and was renamed "Kaliningrad."

Answer 5

It is a matter of National pride. Sometimes after wars, territory changed hands and cities were renamed . For example, after WW1 the northern part of Italy gained the area known as the Tirol from Austria. The major cities in that area changed names. The German names of Meran and Bozen became the Italian Merano and Bolzano.

Answer 6

I think it's done as a kind of reaction--the Europeans often gave places new names, and, upon achieving independence, the names might well be changed to either something in a language native tot he area or back to the original names.

I guess it might be kind of analogous to a woman reverting to her maiden name following a divorce, a sort of reclaiming an identity and individuality completely apart from the more recent past.

Answer 7

technically, a name is a name...the place does not physically change. calling mount everest k22 or kadath or timmy's molehill does not change the fact it is a mountain. a nation of people does not really change regardless of whether you call them vikings or norwegians, for example. the reason you change a name is more for connotation rather than denotation. names carry an emotional and spiritual weight to them. we base words connotatively on what we are familiar with or what we associate with them. if i say "dog" for example, you might thing of a big, snarling mastiff, while I might think of a tiny mop with legs. the reason people change names of places is most of the time to reflect that they are changing from a name that emotionally conjures a negative image or feeling. there was a strong anti-european sentiment in africa and asia when colonization finally came to an end. to reflect the change from being subservient colonies to becoming independent nations in africa and asia, the names changed from ceylon, burma, rhodesia, etc. to things such as sri lanka, mynamar, zimbabwe and names that did not create the connotation of colonization.

Answer 8

It is not renaming. It is retaining the name. The britishers who can't pronounced the name just changed that for their style. Why should we follow it still?
Usually Nouns and Pronouns should be common in all languages.

At the same time, we (Indians) are also killing some proper nouns. Ex. Russia - in Hindi - Roos.

Answer 9

that's a great waste of money. they say they do it to alter South Africa for the greater constructive. Why not use that funds used for renaming and make investments it in progression, interest creation or making the rustic safer... this could make authentic exchange!

Answer 10

Politicians need some thing to attract the crowd and some times they badly need it to mask their failures.Renaming is one of their tactics to attract the native people.Renaming of a city brings nothing except stationary expenses.