Tag Archives: George Bernard Shaw

On Hidden Truths

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“When a thing is funny, search it for a hidden truth.”

– George Bernard Shaw

Exonym

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Exonyms are names used in a particular language to refer to a foreign nation or country; they can be completely different from the name that country uses (in its particular language) to qualify itself. Quite often, they can be of interest from a historical point of view because they can be surprisingly conservative. The exonym is sometimes preserved for hundreds of years after the political or ethnic entity it originally referred to ceased to be.

One of the best-known cases is Germany. Many nations share their linguistic origin with the German term Deutschland, even though they have sometimes assumed a quite different form i.e. Duitsland, Tedesco or Tyskland – from the Proto-Germanic Þeudiskaz. The Slavic peoples call the Germans Niemcy or similar which means ‘a mute’, someone who does not speak Slavic. The French and Spanish, among others, employ the name of the Alamanni tribe. The English, Italians and Russians, to name a few, use a derivative of the Latin Germania or Greek Γερμανία. And the Finns and Baltic states either refer to the name of the Saxon tribe or employ a word of unknown origin, like the Latvian Vacija or the Lithuanian Vokietija.

Consider these other cases:

  • The Latvians call Russia Krievija, referring to an ancient Slavic tribal union, the Krivichi;
  • The Turks call Greece Yunanistan and the Greeks Yunan, another very old exonym which probably has for origin the word ‘Ionia’, that is the Greek region on the coast of Asia Minor;
  • In a kind of an opposite logic, Russia was called Muscovy by the Poles, and then by other Europeans as a way to deny the claim of the Moscow-based government on the totality of Russian lands;
  • The Japanese used to call China Tang even hundreds of years after the end of that dynasty. In the late 19th- and early 20th century they resorted to an even older and more obscure word Shina, which had the advantage of being similar to the equivalent Western terms.

Also, there is something particularly curious about Roman exonyms; it seems the Romans gave completely random names to any people they encountered. A people that called itself Rasenna received the name Tuscans or Etruscans. The inhabitants of Carthage became Punics, and the Hellenes or Achaeans were Greeks. Celts became Galli or the Gauls.

“Patriotism is, fundamentally, a conviction that a particular country is the best in the world because you were born in it.”
– George Bernard Shaw

Hatred

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When contemplating the property hatred, as with knowledge, it turns out to be very difficult to provide an uncontentious analysis. Because of its many different conceptions and dimensions, the full value of hatred is surprisingly hard to capture. To that end, below is a list of quotations to help sketch a definition of the property hatred.

“Often those that criticise others reveal what he himself lacks.”
– Shannon L. Alder

“Try to understand men. If you understand each other you will be kind to each other. Knowing a man well never leads to hate and almost always leads to love.”
– John Steinbeck

“Hate, it has caused a lot of problems in the world, but has not solved one yet.”
– Maya Angelou

“Never waste a minute thinking about people you don’t like.”
– Dwight D. Eisenhower

“Hatred is the coward’s revenge for being intimidated.”
– George Bernard Shaw

“In time we hate that which we often fear.”
– William Shakespeare, (Antony and Cleopatra)

“I will permit no man to narrow and degrade my soul by making me hate him.”
– Booker T. Washington

“Hatred does not cease by hatred, but only by love; this is the eternal rule.”
– Gautama Buddha

See more: Approximations

On Interpretations

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“No man ever believes that the Bible means what it says; he is always convinced that it says what he means.”

– George Bernard Shaw