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Renaming Remaining

constantinople

Now it's Istanbul, not Constantinople Been a long time gone, Constantinople Why did Constantinople get the works? That's nobody's business but the Turks - Lyrics from They Might Be Giants, "Istanbul Not Constantinople"

Will the Real Anti-Colonial Name Please Stand Up? There is a stimulating short article on BBC, City names mark changing times. The article covers the movement toward changing the South African city name of Pretoria to Tshwane, after a black tribal leader who ruled long before European colonization. Yet, according the article, Pretoria may in fact be an anti-colonial name itself with South Africa's last apartheid President FW de Klerk once associating Pretoria with the Dutch Boer struggle against the British Empire. In a comment to the article, a reader questions why there hasn't the same momentum to change the name of Soweto, which in fact means South Western Township. Some other recent city renamings: Harare (Salisbury), Zimbabwe St. Petersburg (Leningrad), Russia Yangon (Rangoon), Myanmar Mumbai (Bombay), India Chennai (Madras), India Kolkata (Calcutta), India Renaming - Remaining The renaming of cities is an interesting phenomena. Almost all cities, over time, have been renamed. From New Amsterdam/New York to the city that I live in, Saigon/Ho Chi Minh City. Saigon and HCMC largely remain interchangable in common parlance. While HCMC, or more correctly TP HCM (Thành phố Hô Chí Minh [City of Ho Chi Minh]) is always used for official transactions and documents. How complete is the real or perceived transformation of a city when a new name is instituted? Throughout Vietnam, the renaming occurs down to the street level. Ironically, the street name for Alexandre de Rhodes in HCMC has not been changed, the missionary responsible for the entire transliteration of the the Vietnamese written language from Chữ-nôm script to the Roman alphabet. (Nom, coincidentally, is a latin root meaning name, as in nomenclature) The fact is that renaming is everything and nothing (as Borges might have said). My own short renamed history might read: The orphanage of R. Streitmatter-Tran (Trần Trọng Đạt) was once located on Ly Tư Trọng Street (Gia Long Street) in Hô Chí Minh City (Saigon). Borges begins his story with "I do not know which of us has written this page."

 

Every Name in History is I

Rich, are you familiar with Ho Tzu Nyen's artwork about the mythical founder of Singapore -- Utama -- Every Name in History is I? I mention the artwork at the end of this essay: http://www.experimenta.org/mesh/mesh17/choy.htm

Here are some screenshots of the film...

 

Renaming suggestions (while "we are" already at it)

Since renaming places is very common in South Africa (Azania/Mzanzi) these days, I would like to suggest that a street next to the parliament of Cape Town, the Queen Victoria St., named after a war monger (who, among other things, wasn't in favor of Balkan country rebelling against Ottoman oppression), should be renamed after an exitic historical figure, who contributed to the matter of halting the Ottoman Empire's advance into Europe. So that street, I believe, should be called Count Dracula St.
And if the name of Western Transvaal is "not good enough", I would suggest that is should be called "Western Transylvania, rather then "South North", or something.