What’s in a name?

As Shakespeare famously observed, “What’s in a name? …a rose by any other name would smell as sweet”. This is Juliet – as in Romeo and Juliet – talking to herself about the slightly inconvenient problem that the man with whom she had just fallen in love comes from the clan who are sworn enemies to her own family.

Be that as it may, young Juliet is right in one sense – that rose would smell just as sweet as if it were called “tarmac” or “sea breeze”. But she’s wrong in another sense. What we are called and what we call ourselves is crucial in terms of shaping others’ views. Call it a rose, and people immediately think that they can smell the haunting perfume of a rose, see the blush pink colour, and feel the velvet of the petals. As for roses, so for people. Why else would Norma Jean Mortensen, Thomas Mapother, Archie Leach, Greta Gustafsson, Peggy Hookham and Louise Ciccone, to name a few, change their names and go on to international fame and fortune?  And if you don’t know today’s names for these people, see the answers at the end of this blog^*.

And what, you’re asking yourself, has any of this got to do with Kazakhstan? One of the first decisions I made when told by my bosses in London that I had been chosen to become the next British Ambassador to Kazakhstan was that I should learn the Kazakh language. It’s a beautiful language with a musicality which – much more than English – lends itself to poetry and the oral performance. Even as a beginner learner (and believe me, I am!) I can see the way in which the hard / soft vowels and consonants, and the small but telling variations in the different versions of suffixes, lends itself to something best appreciated when its spoken out aloud. But it’s not an easy language for a native English speaker to learn. In my Ministry, we classify it in terms of difficulty in the same group as Farsi, Hungarian, Pashto and Lao. Believe me, I’ve had to work hard to get to even the simple level of ability that I can manage at present.

But learning the Kazakh language made me think about all those cities whose names were so familiar from the time when I was working in Moscow – in the late 1980s / early 1990s – and which now, thanks to the rise in importance of the Kazakh language, have undergone changes. Just like Norma Jean and the rest, cities in this part of the world have a habit of acquiring new names as the societies and countries which make up Eurasia grow and develop. Semipalatinsk back then is today’s Semey. Before it was Semipalatinsk, it was Alash Kala. Or take the town on the Volga where, a hundred years ago, English engineers were living and working in the oil fields of Guriyev. Today, thousands of British engineers live and work in the same place – but now it’s Atyrau, Kazakhstan’s Oil Capital.

But the best known of all these changes is the city where I live today. What started out as the small town of Akmolinsk – the City of the White Tomb – became the much larger town of Tselinograd as young people in the 1950s took up the challenge of Khrushchev’s Virgin Lands Campaign. After Kazakhstan became independent, back came the Kazakh language version of its original name – Akmola – before, on being selected to be the new capital for a new country, it changed its name once more to become “The Capital” – or “Astana”, in Kazakh.

Which brings me back to young Juliet, and her efforts to convince herself that it really doesn’t matter too much that her boyfriend is a Montague rather than (like herself) a Capulet. Sorry, Juliet, but it does matter – as you’ll find out in Act V, when it all goes horribly wrong and you end up dead. I’m much happier living in a city which sees itself as the proud young capital of a country – Astana – than I would be in one which reminds me of a white marble mausoleum which perhaps once existed here, somewhere on the vast Northern Kazakh steppe, many, many centuries ago.

^*Marilyn Monroe, Tom Cruise, Cary Grant, Greta Garbo, Margot Fonteyn and Madonna