March 13, 2006
Politically Correct Spelling Posted by John Steele Gordon at 11:00 AM EST Pardon me while I vent, but there is a new fashion abroad in the land that should be nipped in the bud: politically correct spelling. I was reading an interesting new book last night, Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World by Nicholas Ostler, when I ran across this sentence about the first meeting of Hernán Cortés and the Aztec emperor: “Motecuhzoma, born to sit on the royal mat of Mexico and already victorious in many wars, was carried on a litter, resplendent in a vast circular headdress with plumes of lustrous green quetzal, ornaments on his nose, ears and lower lip, behind him an escort of warriors wearing jaguar hides and eagle feathers.” A handy footnote explained that Motecuhzoma is “Better known in the corrupted form Montezuma.” Now, to be sure, linguists use the word “corrupt” to mean only “altered from the original” not necessarily debased in some way. And every language is full of “corrupt” terms. Raccoon comes from the Algonquin word for that creature, which is unknown in Europe, ärähkun. Admiral comes, ultimately, from the Arabic amir-al. The Spanish word coctel is a corruption of the English cocktail, while Kaiser and tsar are both corruptions of the Latin caesar. So there is a simple reason that Montezuma is better known to English speakers than Motecuhzoma: Montezuma is the English word for the last Aztec emperor while Motecuhzoma is the word in Nahuatl, the language of the Aztecs, as it is transliterated into the Roman alphabet. A linguist, I suppose, might be forgiven for this, but there is no excuse in popular magazines and newspapers for this pretentious nonsense. For one thing, it violates both the first rule of good writing (be clear) and the second rule (don’t distract the reader from the point you are trying to make). Place names are now often given in the language of the area in which the place is found. The March 2006 issue of National Geographic has a long article on Ukraine in which the capital of that country is given as Kyiv. Interestingly, the seventh edition of the National Geographic Atlas of the World gives it as Kyyiv while the sixth edition—which came out before the collapse of the Soviet Union—gives it as Kiyev. This is just a guess, for I know neither language, but I bet Kyyiv is a transliteration of the Ukrainian while Kiyev is from the Russian version of the word. But what on earth is wrong with the long-established English word Kiev? Have you ever seen chicken Kyiv on a menu? The spelling stops the reader cold while he asks himself, “I know what they mean, but why are they spelling it that way?” The argument, such as it is, I suppose, is that when in Rome one should spell as the Romans do (although I have yet to see the capital of Italy rendered as Roma). But this is to confuse two very different things: the thing itself and the word by which the thing is denoted in the English language. In other words, we are not in Rome, we are in English, and we should stay there. Other languages have their own words for foreign places and see nothing wrong with them. The French call the city at the southern end of Lake Michigan (roughly) she-cah-go, with no accented syllable. (They also still spell New York—the city not the state—New-York, retaining the hyphen that New Yorkers dropped two hundred years ago.) The most notorious recent example of p.c. orthography is the word for the holy book of Islam. English speakers have called it Koran for almost 300 years now (the OED gives the date of 1725). But suddenly even such normally sensible newspapers as The Wall Street Journal are spelling it Quran. Even worse, Newsweek, among others, now spells it Qur’an. What is that apostrophe for? In English there are only three uses for an apostrophe: to indicate possession (John’s book), a contraction (John can’t come), or a transition from one sort of symbols to another (the 1960’s). The last use is rapidly dying out. The apostrophe in Qur’an, as near as I can figure out—not knowing a single word of Arabic or the rules whereby it is transliterated into the Roman alphabet—is that it is a breath mark, whatever that might be. Why is Newsweek spelling Koran that way? So as not to offend Muslims? The silliness of that idea is easily seen in a thought experiment: What is the Arabic word for Bible or Torah? I don’t know either and, like you, I’m sure, I don’t care. Arabic is not my language, English is. This effort to be politically correct can, in fact, lead to political trouble by taking sides. English speakers have long called the capital of Belgium Brussels. The Belgians call it either Bruxelles (French) of Brussel (Flemish). Which should we choose? Should the largest city in Quebec be spelled Montreal and pronounced MONT-tree-all, or spelled Montréal and pronounced Mon-ray-al (that N is nasalized, not a sound that occurs in English). For that matter, should it be Quebec (cwe-BEC) or Québec (kay-bec)? English speakers have long called the strategic body of water in the Middle East the “Persian Gulf.” Arabs insist it should be called the “Arabian Gulf.” To whom should we pander? As far as I know, the French have never objected to English speakers referring to another strategic body of water as the “English Channel.” (The French call it la Manche—the sleeve—after its shape.) As Cole Porter suggested, let’s call the whole thing off. In truth, it is a compliment when the speakers of a foreign language regard a place or person of such importance that they coin a word to denote that person or place in their own language instead of trying—invariably unsuccessfully—to pronounce the foreign word correctly. To have and to use the English word is a sign of respect, not disrespect. It says, “You are important to us.”
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