Tracing "Mountainland" and "Muddy Mouth"

INTRIGUING MAP: Find the meaning of nations, cities and towns in The Atlas of True Names

IN the past 12 months, I’ve visited Land of the Brave Ones, Islands of the Flowland and Land of the Swift and Strong Ones. For the past few years, I’ve been thinking of travelling to the Fortified Land and Land of the Noble Ones.

If you’re wondering what I’m going on about, those are the names of actual countries from a “literal place name” map, or a map which traces the roots of place names around the world and then translates them into English.

The countries which I listed as among the ones I went to over the past year are respectively, Mongolia, Indonesia and Myanmar while the ones I’ve been thinking of visiting are Morocco and Iran.

This amazing map called the Atlas of True Names was put together by German cartographers Stephan Hormes and Silke Peust, who spent years researching names of countries, cities and towns.

In an interview with German website Spiegel Online, the husband and wife team said: “The names give you an insight into what the people saw when they first looked at a place, almost with the eyes of children. Through the maps, we wanted to show what they saw.”

The map includes meanings of land features like mountains (Mount Everest is the Ever Resting Mountain), deserts (the Sahara is the Tawny One) and rivers (the Amazon is the lovely but ominous the Boat Unsettler).

If this map and its evocative names remind you of locations in J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of The Rings, that’s not surprising because before Tolkien decided on names like “Mount Doom” and “Dead Marshes”, he looked at how people long ago named their homelands. In fact, in the Atlas of True Names, the Mediterranean Sea is called the Sea of the Middle Earth.

Many countries were named based on location, although it’s unclear what it is in respect of. Yemen, for instance, is Land to the Right (the right of what?) while Vietnam is translated as Southland.

If you’re wondering what Malaysia is in the atlas, it’s translated as “Mountainland”, while our capital is “Muddy Mouth”. Close, but I would be happier if it was “Muddy River Mouth”.

The map, however, is an exercise in the study of words and linguists are a nit-picky, fussy lot, and some have disagreed with how the etymological meanings have been arrived at. It’s not difficult to see why Hormes and Peust are cartographers, not linguists. They may have researched the origin of names, but they didn’t apply the subtleties of language or consider context. For instance, language experts have pointed out that St Petersburg in Russia has been wrongly named as “St Stonecastle” (from petros, which is “rock” in Greek).

The cartographers, they say, should have taken historical context into account and translated the city as “Holy City of Peter the Great” because it was named after Tsar Peter the Great.

Hormes and Peust also appear to have been inconsistent in the version of the names they translated for countries which have both an English as well as a native name.

For example, China is curiously renamed “Riceland” on the map because the mapmakers had opted to translate its English name “China” (qin apparently refers to a strain of rice) instead of “Zhongguo”, which is how the Chinese refer to their country.

If the mapmakers had done otherwise, China would have been translated as “Middle Kingdom”, which is what “Zhongguo” means in Mandarin. The name “Middle Kingdom” would be consistent with the belief of the ancient Chinese that their nation was the centre of the world, surrounded by barbarians.

Similarly, in researching the meaning behind “New Zealand”, if the cartographers had translated “Aotearoa”, which is the Maori name for the country instead of the Anglicised version of the Dutch “Nieuw Zeeland”, they would have arrived at the more poetic “Land of the Long White Cloud” instead of “New Sea Land”.

On the other hand, Singapore has been rightly translated as “Liontown”, which means that unlike what was done with China and New Zealand, the Sanskrit “Singapura” was translated and not the city state’s English name.

If you’d like to have a look at the map, go to http://www.kalimedia.com/Atlas_of_True_Names.html and compare the names you see with the modern-day names of countries.

Hormes and Peust have inserted a disclaimer on the map that not all translations are definitive and that the Atlas of True Names should simply be accepted as “as an invitation to the world as a strange, romantic continent”. And I agree  — the world is a strange, romantic place.

Even if you take issue with how the translations were arrived at, the map produced by Hormes and Peust is a fascinating document and a reminder that once upon a time, the world was a much simpler and literal place.

This is most evident in the names of smaller places like towns and villages. How else would you explain names like City of Many Fish (Panama City, Panama), Place by the Cool River (Nairobi, Kenya) and I Don’t Understand You!, complete with exclamation mark, for Yucatan in Mexico.

Since coming across this document, I have found myself being increasingly intrigued by certain countries and now feel like visiting them based purely on the meanings behind their names.

Wouldn’t it be wonderful to visit a country because its name meant Land of the Really Strong Ones (Turkmenistan), the End of the World (Madagascar), Area Where There is Nothing (Namibia) or Place to Find Gold (Cuba)?

The Atlas of True Names has been put together by German cartographers Stephan Hormes and Silke Peust, who spent years researching names of countries, cities and towns.

Tracing "Mountainland" and "Muddy Mouth"