Thank heaven my husband doesn’t even pretend to like football. Indeed he emphasises his indifference by making ironic remarks like: ‘Poor old Ivory Coast was robbed.’
The World Cup has brought out the Babel in naming countries. Do we call them by the established English names or by what they call themselves? Ivory Coast, which has French as its official language, calls itself Côte d’Ivoire. (Diacritics cause online complications, as with plucky little Curaçao, which I heard referred to as ‘Cure-a-cow’.) Fifa too employs the home-grown Côte d’Ivoire, but BBC News and BBC Sport call it Ivory Coast.
To us it is obvious that Germany is not Deutschland and Spain is not España. As names used by those outside, Germany and Spain are known as exonyms. This word has been in use only since 1957, when the earliest citation in the OED suggested ‘for those who prefer jargon’ the term English exonyms. A more recent quotation, from 2019, declares: ‘Gypsy is an exonym derived from Egyptian, which is how Romani people were described when the diaspora was first noted in Britain.’
There, those using the exonym are outsiders to the Romani ethnic groups, since the Romani have no one country. George Borrow’s Romany Rye uses the same word, knowing they didn’t call themselves Gypsies. In Romani, rom means ‘a man’.
But the Romanians’ name for their own country, Romania, derived from the Latin Romanus. From the mid-19th century, Romanians preferred to spell their country Romania, which we British caught up with in the 20th century, abandoning Rumania.
As even the wicked Gibbon acknowledged, ‘the name of Romans adhered to the last fragments of the empire of Constantinople’. But today, the rulers of Istanbul expect foreigners to refer to their country as Türkiye, which BBC News and Sport don’t. To judge by some comments online, you’d think Turkey was knocked out of the World Cup solely because of its spelling demands.
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