On the Naming of Cities

Saigon. Ho Chi Minh City. Saigon. Without intending to, I kept reverting to the pre-1975 name for Vietnam's largest city. By the end of the week, I figured to heck with it, gave in, and just called it Saigon.

In the last few years renaming cities has become quite the trend -particularly in Asia. India has been changing the names of it’s cities faster than my teenage daughter cycles through outfits on a Sunday morning before church. Bombay is now Mumbai. Calcutta is now Kolkata. Madras is Chennai.

On one hand, I get that people and people groups should be able to control the terms by which they are referred. If they want to be servers instead of waiters, it seems a little silly to me, but I can roll with that. Flight attendants, not stewardess. Got it.

But on the other hand, historically we haven’t insisted that people refer to places using the local language. No English speaker refers to it as Deutschland. It’s Germany. No one in English spells and pronounces it Nippon. It’s Japan. Poland, not Polska -at least in English. And everybody seems to be okay with that.

So please forgive me while I continue to refer to your country as Ivory Coast, not Côte d'Ivoire. I mean you no slight, it’s just that I don’t speak French and when I try to affect a French accent I sound more ridiculous than Steve Martin playing Inspector Clouseau in the Pink Panther remakes.

Nobody seems to get their undies in a bunch when Croatians refer to it as Sjedinjene Američke Države. Or Italians call it Stati Uniti d'America. Or the Chinese Meilijian Hezhongguo.

I am sure that Beijing is closer to the way it’s pronounced in Mandarin, but I don’t speak Mandarin. So would it be outrageous if I called it by the name by which it was known to English speakers for almost two centuries: Peking?

But changing Saigon to Ho Chi Minh City Minh was not simply an attempt to change the way outsiders spell and pronounce the name of their city. That change was overtly political. More on par with changing St. Petersburg to Leningrad for ideological reasons. And we see how well that change stuck. After several decades as an attempted tribute to one of the twentieth centuries more ruthless ideologues, the people of Russia decided that they preferred the much more traditional, longstanding name. So back to St. Petersburg it is.

So when I refer to it as Saigon, don’t think of me as several years behind the curve; think of me as several decades ahead of schedule.

Besides that wildly successful musical of a few years ago just wouldn’t have the same ring to it if it was known as Miss Ho Chi Minh City.