I come from New Zealand, a country that was named after the Dutch province of Zeeland. “Zeeland” literally means “sea country”, a not particularly original title for either the Dutch coastal area or the islands in the south of the Pacific. A dull placename warmed over, but it gets worse.

New Zealand is made up of two main islands, which have names suggesting they were invented by a teenager briefly inspired by Tolkien’s world-building but who became distracted before finishing the roughing-out stage of mapmaking. (Perhaps our would-be cartographer was named Stewart: the next largest island is Stewart Island, which always gets forgotten when discussing New Zealand geography — except, presumably, by the 400-odd people who live there.) The big two are the North Island and the South Island (correct usage includes the article): names which one imagines were pencilled in at some point early in New Zealand’s European history and which inexplicably were not replaced before general use went over them in ink.

Even more inexplicably, there are perfectly good Maori alternatives for these names, which could have replaced these awkward relics decades ago but somehow never have. The South Island is Te Wai Pounamu which means “the water(s) of greenstone” (somewhat oddly, since greenstone is not geologically associated with water; apparently the name descends from the more sensible Te Wāhi Pounamu, meaning the place of greenstone). The North Island is Te Ika-a-Māui, Maui’s fish,¹ from a legend that relates how the folk hero Maui fished up the island (all 113,729 square kilometres of it) using a hook made of his grandmother’s jawbone and baited with blood from his own nose. These names are conscientiously included in official publications, since New Zealand is nominally bilingual, but for everyday matters we’re stuck with “up North” and “down South”.

Unfortunately it doesn’t end there. The West Coast (of the South Island) is famous for its stormy weather and high rainfall and boasts a town called Westport; you may have seen the East Coast (this time of the North Island, and including East Cape) in the film Whale Rider. Westland is a West Coast district (confusingly Westport is not in Westland, although it is on the West Coast), while Southland is both an “administrative region” (like the West Coast) and a district within that region (like Westland).² There is even a World Heritage Area known as South Westland.

Of the European placenames in New Zealand that you can’t navigate by, the vast majority are reheated servings of Britain. Wellington the capital is named for Wellington the general, Nelson city for Admiral Nelson, and so on. Showing slightly more originality, Dunedin (where I studied for my first degree) is the Scots Gaelic for Edinburgh (I suspect both to mean Edin-town, but thankfully “Edin” doesn’t seem to be a compass direction or a military gentleman). After this promising beginning, though, they folded, lifting enormous numbers of streetnames wholesale from the Scottish capital: George Street and Great King Street, Princes Street, Royal Terrace, Duke Street, and on down the feudal hierarchy (of limited relevance in our far-off colony, but all the more preciously commemorated for that fact); I’ve lived on Elm Row and Dundas Street, and finding the latter in Edinburgh on Google maps turns up (among many other familiar names) the agreeable juxtaposition of Cumberland and Northumberland as well.

The peninsula protecting Dunedin’s harbour is known as “The Peninsula”.

Part of the problem in New Zealand is of course colonisation. Pakeha (non-Maori) arrived awfully recently in New Zealand, and set about making themselves feel at home by ignoring the natives and naming everything after what they held dear (admirals and generals, the royal family, and points of the compass; this might tell you something about British imperial character). It’s hardly fair to expect some colonial governor, who has to be good at administration and at convincing the local Maori to sell their land for a pittance, on top of all that to have a poetic soul as well. But places with a slightly thicker crust of history accumulate meaningful names. Maori placenames refer to ways the land was used, to legends and stories, to significant events, and to geological features (they probably include a few royal names as well, although none as prosaic as “George”). English placenames in England, too, carry historical information (“salt found here”) but that gets lost when they’re translated to the other side of the world.

Other parts of the globe suffer from precisely the opposite problem: too much overlaid history, leading to a chaos of placenames whose meanings, and even original languages, become lost. My Christmas stocking this year, in New Zealand, included John Man’s biography of Genghis Khan,³ which I read on the plane trip back to Amsterdam. One striking feature of this fascinating history is how many different civilisations, speaking different languages, get a mention once you are looking at a large enough area and a thousand of years of history rather than a scanty few hundred. So you get: “The people of Xi Xia referred to themselves as the Mi. [...] The Chinese called them the Dangxian, while in Mongol they became Tangut (Dang plus a Mongolian -ut plural). The Tanguts of Xi Xia: that’s how they are known today.”⁴

And inspired by the multilingual multi-plural reduplication of “Tanguts”, I’ll finish with a lovely bit of nonsense from Steven Brust’s The Phoenix Guards:⁵

The Serioli, who departed the area to avoid any of the unfortunate incidents that war can produce, left only the name for the place, which was “Ben”, meaning “ford” in their language. The Easterners called the place “Ben Ford”, or, in the Eastern tongue, “Ben gazlo”.

After ten years of fierce battle, the Imperial Army won a great victory on the spot, driving the Easterners well back into the mountains. The Dragonlords who had found the place, then, began calling it “Bengazlo Ford.” The Dragons, wishing to waste as little time on speech as possible, shortened this to Benglo Ford, or, in the tongue of the Dragon, which was still in use at the time, “Benglo ara.” Eventually, over the course of the millenia, the tongue of the Dragon fell out of use, and the Northwestern⁶ language gained preeminence, which rendered the location Bengloara Ford, which was eventually shorted to Bengloarafurd. The river crossing became the Bengloarafurd Ford, which name it held until after the Interregnum when the river was dredged and the Bengloarafurd Bridge was built.

Notes:

1. The placenames have macrons because I’m conscientiously copy-pasting them from Wikipedia to make sure of the spelling, but I don’t have easy access to macrons by typing. If the names indeed enter common currency I’m sure they will erode away fairly quickly anyway.
2. No, I don’t know this stuff by heart. Blame Wikipedia.
3. My sister just got married to a Mongolian man, so the family has developed quite an interest in the area.
4. The story of the survival of the 13th-century Secret History of the Mongols is equally multilingual. It was recorded by Ming officials in Chinese characters (which make a very imperfect match to the Mongolian original; Man gives the analogy of writing Hamlet’s famous soliloquy in nonsense French, beginning Tu bille orne hôte tu bille), and retranslated back into Mongolian beginning only in the late 19th century: “tricky if you are working from fourteenth-century Chinese to restore thirteenth-century Mongol, neither of which anyone knows how to pronounce”.
5. The stuffy style is deliberate, and one of the joys of the book — however unlikely that may appear from this short extract.
6. Brust, too, sometimes makes overly heavy use of the compass in his worldbuilding.

He claims that in Romania whistling is something that you do only when you are alone; shepherds whistle while watching their flocks, or one whistles when walking in the woods. And because one only whistles when alone, one can also whistle in order to convey the sense “I believe I am alone”. Up until now, I believe him. But the next bit stretches my credulity almost to breaking point: apparently one can deliberately insult someone by whistling in their presence. It means something like “I believe there is nobody (of consequence) here with me”.

Happily, we’ve come to an agreement: I will whistle when I feel like it, and he won’t feel insulted. Another case of successful intercultural diplomacy in our bustling multicultural workplace.

[T]o correct a bad sentence satisfactorily is not always possible; it should never have existed, that is all that can be said.

From The King’s English, spotted by Maud Newton.

• A serpent. These seem to turn up quite often, but sell for rather large amounts of money.
• “Large quantity of Phillips London auction musical instrument catalogues.” Because what you need to buy at an auction is the catalogue for a different auction. Which has closed.
• A fife and piccolo. “Old” (which seems to be code for “broken-down but not antique”), went for 32 quid.
• “Fourteen various cast-iron flute key presses.” … For … pressing the keys on a cast-iron flute?
• Twenty cases: one hard cello case, three double-bass cases, and sixteen (sixteen) soft cello cases. Useful, I imagine, if you plan to bid on:
• Lot 206, six cellos;
• Lot 207, six 3/4 size cellos;
• Lot 208, another six 3/4 size cellos; or
• Lot 209, three 1/2 size cellos.
• Five trombones. Which sold, collectively, for 30 quid.
• Four basoon crooks. (—I bought five trombones, what about you? —Well, I bid on the “quantity of various bassoon sections” but lost. So I’m left with these. Fancy a bassoon crook?)
• A sousaphone.
• An ophicleide (which I honestly thought was a made-up instrument).
• A marching lyre.
• A marching lyre.

There are also some fine examples of the cataloguer’s art. Savour this one, for instance:

Early 20th century brass adjustable music stand, the shaped spindle ledge supported upon a circular column terminating in triple curving legs and pad feet; also a ukulele banjo, case.

Or the crisply implied distinctions between a “quantity” of bows and a “bundle” of bows, both as distinct from a “small bundle” of bows. (One bow, incidentally, sold for 1500 pounds. The small bundle, for in the region of 12.)

I have to say, I’m tempted to try to pick up a sousaphone or ophicleide. Although I can imagine some difficulties with RyanAir on the way back to Amsterdam…

Might it have something to do with this?

Here’s the other end of the spectrum. (I tried to do this recently with books: pages-per-day estimated from page counts and start/finish reading dates. Scrapped the project for a number of reasons: (a) I had to fill in pagecount manually, (b) my reading records were patchy and have since gotten even patchier, (c) given a small data set and not much continuity (tendency to finish one book before starting the next) the colours are not as informative and interesting, and (d) my attempt at making graphed area precisely informative turned out more confusing than I expected.)

A review of Max Hastings’ “family fable” Did you really shoot the television? picks out his headmaster’s observation that “his contemporaries do not like him, and they are not bad judges of character”.

I actually suspect the other one is not intended as an insult at all, but the misreading is too precious to pass up. Peter Maber says Philip Hook’s prose “effortlessly conceals a wealth of knowledge and experience”. Gives a good impression, then, does it?

Here are a couple of youtube clips that might help clear up the difference.

This one is about Australia:

And this one shows pretty much the worst thing that any New Zealand wildlife is likely to do to you:

(The first was featured on Pharyngula, not sure any more where I turned up the second one.)

There’s a smart initiative here, issuing stickers for on your mailbox that say “No unaddressed advertising, no house-to-house newsletters” (or no to one but yes to the other). They’re nationwide and highly recognisable, with a big “NEE/NEE” or “NEE/JA”. They might even keep some of the junk away, who knows?

Today’s post contained a flyer from GroenLinks, a political party whose name translates literally as “GreenLeft”. The flyer informs us that because of our NEE/NEE sign, they did not leave a house-to-house newsletter in our mailbox. It also tells us where we can go for more information about the party.

Funnily enough, the flyer doesn’t mention the fact that despite our NEE/NEE sign they did leave unaddressed advertising in our mailbox. But perhaps they realised that we could figure that out without their help.

He handed in a homework containing the immortal line “Je bent een aap, dat je dat weet” (“Just so you know, you’re a monkey”) instead of one of the answers.¹ He went on to accuse me of not being able to produce my own answers, which (after some puzzling) I decided probably meant that he found the exercise too hard.

It took me almost a week to work up a response. First I had to cool down; then I had to find out the official policy (I’m only a teaching assistant, am I allowed to kick students out of my classroom for rudeness?); then I hoped to talk to the guy at the lesson but he didn’t show up. At that point I decided this was probably a flamboyant way of announcing his decision to quit the class.² Finally I sent a rather acerbic mail pointing out that insulting the person who grades your work probably isn’t the smartest policy if you care about passing, and asking him if he indeed was quitting the course.³ I didn’t expect an answer.

But I got one: “I’m afraid it was a terrible mistake,” and “Rest assured it will not happen again.” The poor sod had sent me a file intended for one of his fellow students (for “reference” purposes, of course…).

The moral? For my students, I’d suggest: don’t send your work around “for reference purposes” (boring, I know). For the rest of the world… When someone calls you a monkey, don’t assume they mean it? The one I’m taking away from this is, always count your monkeys before you hit “Send”.

Notes:

1. Olga suggested that he was simply confused about my species, and that I could help him out by trimming my beard more often. Supporting evidence being that at the Babylon Circus gig I danced “like a monkey” (O. Grigoriadou, p.c.). Against this hypothesis two observations: (1) it fails to explain the comment about finding my own answers, see below, and (2) the homework was delivered before the gig in question. As far as I can recall I have never danced in the classroom, like a monkey or otherwise.
2. In the meantime there were other irritations to deal with: half the class didn’t read the instructions for the homework (“work in pairs”) and there were several folk to hassle about copying.
3. For the record, I also announced the policy that work containing insults would get no grade.