What's in a name?

I'm back to language once again. It seems that this year one of my central themes has been language although I hadn't planned it that way at all. At the moment I'm looking at the use of language for control in the British colonization of Ireland. It's a theme I'm very interested in as I enjoy learning about Irish history. What bothers me at the moment know is not the translation of places into English names. For example the translation of the Irish Abha into 'river' is pretty simple as one can point to a river and it is the same. However, the translation of Irish names into English is a bit stranger. 'Siobhan' translates into the English 'Jane' or 'Joanne.' I wonder who decided that one equates to the other as no two people are ever the same. Perhaps at one point there were a 'Siobhan' and a 'Jane' who were exactly the same and someone said 'Well, Siobhan must be Jane.' I don't know but it seems strange that a name can be so easily translated from one language to the next as if people can be easily translated from singular to particular.

The use of language looks to have been a serious method of control in collonial Ireland. As Lyotard points out 'names grouped into calendars, cartographical systems, genealogies and civil statutes are indicators of a possible reality.' All of Ireland's places were translated into English and placed within statue books, new maps were drawn up and a new reality was created that conformed to the universal narrative that the British Empire was trying to create. A new 'possible reality' was created that was based upon English narratives rather than Irish. Irish children were forced to go to national schools where they were made to speak English, road signs and place names were transcribed into English and the language began to dwindle. Now, according to recent statistics, there are only around 20,000 fluent Irish language speakers in Ireland. This seems to me to be a terribly sad situation, a conflict arose between two narratives; now one has almost been practically eradicated and a different reality put in place. The Irish phrase universe (to use Lyotard's terms) is now little more than an object to be cognized by linguists.

Along the same line of thinking; a friend of mine works in a call centre and has recently been sent to India to train native Indians to work in the call centres. He told me that the employees have to take an Anglicised names to use while they are at work because apparently people in the UK want to hear familiar names. This isn't the eradication of a language but it has a certain wrongness about it. Do we desire the world to be so flat that we cannot bear a name from another culture when we speak down the telephone? The employees also have to go to meetings once a week where they are told things that apparently we will want to talk about: i.e. the Eastenders plotline, what's happening with the Beckhams, who's getting evicted in Big Brother. A very sneaky way to implant the nonsense that fills our tabloids into a different culture but one that I imagine will be quite successful. When my friend gets back I'll be interested to know what he was doing and what sort of set up they have over there. He told me that he's going to suggest our names to the employees. Then there'll be a group of people with the same names as my friends in a different country. -Very- strange. I wonder what name 'Siobhan' will transcribe into in Punjabi or Bengali.

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