Guys with Swords Control the French Language

**Andrew Heaton** (0:00)
Last month, Donald Trump issued Executive Order 14422, directing the Secretary of the Interior, in coordination with the US. Board on Geographic Names, to rename Lake Ontario to Lake America. In effect, directing the Federal Agency in charge of maps to update their records with that name revision. Google Maps keys off of official government naming sources, so it's either Lake America or Lake Canada, depending on which country you find yourself in. Raising the question, did Trump actually rename the lake? Can he? Does New York State have to reprint its maps? If I go out on a boat, do I have to say it's Lake America?
In short, when someone changes a name, when someone changes language, who owns that language? Who controls it? When can a government make a sweeping change to usage? That's what we're going to figure out today, right here on The Political Orphanage.
Hello, and welcome to The Political Orphanage, a home for curious, thinky people that are going to learn a lot about linguistic history today spanning from France to Norway to Turkey, and finally, the United States and Canada. But let's begin with this. It's extremely difficult to rename a river. Territories can be conquered. Populations can be subdued or migrate. Istanbul was once Constantinople. Ceylon became Sri Lanka. But rivers, if you ever conquer some heathen nation, don't bother trying to rename their river.
Hydronyms, where the names of bodies of water are notoriously sticky, because rivers are aquatic highways. They always have been. They connect all matter of towns and travelers and tongues. An earl can march an army into a field and claim it for himself, and eventually it will be Bob's Field. He can name a mountain after his favorite saint, Saint Mungo. But hydronyms are more practical than they are symbolic, because everybody uses the river, and they need to be able to reference it and trade routes without getting sucked into stupid political arguments. So you try renaming that river, and next year, a bunch of merchants from Scythia are going to come in, and they're going to use the old river's name, and you're going to have to exp- no, actually, okay, from now on, we're calling it Saint Mungo's river from now on, and eventually the aspiring conqueror will just get sick of it and sigh and go, yeah, it's the Thames. Yeah, you know what? You're right, it's the Thames, we're going to go with the Thames.
Actually, let's go with the Thames for a moment, shall we? The Romans didn't bother trying to rename the gurgling waters of the Thames when they conquered it from the Celts. They just Latinized it a little bit, calling it Tamesus or Tamsus. And quite likely, the Celts whom they'd conquered had not named it themselves. They had inherited that name from the Neolithic farmers that they had conquered, absorbed, displaced, or genocide it. And those ancient Britons that had come before them, they had probably been the ones to name the Thames, using a name quite like that, Thames, Thames, something like that, meaning the dark water and the archaic tongue of the Proto-Indo-Europeans. So the Thames as a moniker is quite likely older than Stonehenge, named by an extinct people going back thousands of years.
And that river empties into the English Channel, which is a very large moat separating Britain from France. Although the French don't call it the English Channel, do they? They call it Le Manche, or The Sleeve, owing to the shape of that particular sea. Now in that instance, the names are parallel nomenclature. When you and I visit Paris and we parlez France, we will call the English Channel Le Manche. And conversely, when French people speak English, as they should, they will say the English Channel. It's not that we disagree on what to call it, it's that we agree it has different names, depending on the language in which it is invoked. Although often, when some body of water or island has totally different names, it does signify a political dispute. Are those grassy clumps near Argentina, the Falkland Islands or the Malvinas? Will any upstanding red-blooded Brit will tell you that it's the Falklands, even when speaking in Spanish? Maybe they'll meet them halfway and say El Falkland.
If you and I play poker with Javier Malay, however, he's going to call them Malvinas, even if he's speaking English, which he should. The word choice we use signifies the political framework we champion. And this is where we are with the lake formerly known as Ontario and the Gulf of America, nay Mexico, a linguistic line in the sand or waves as it were, whose word choice determines which side of a political dispute you are on. If you're on Team Canada, you say Ontario and you say Lake America if you own truck nuts. Ah, you ask. But who gets to name the thing for their respective sides? Let's say Javier Malé really sticks it to Prime Minister Andy Burnham. He beats him in the poker game and the United Kingdom has to capitulate on the Falklands. It's the Malvinas now.