Matters of linguistic and geographic fact are determined by meritorious debate, not majoritarian opinion.
Yesterday the New Zealand Geographic Board announced that there is a valid case for the name of the city of Wanganui to be spelt in its correct rendition of Whanganui. (I posted on this issue twice recently.)
The NZGB explicitly rejected the majoritarian argument, stating that the debate was important, not just the show of hands:
The Board noted the results of a referendum held in 2006, when a considerable number of Wanganui residents indicated their preference to retain the current spelling. However, the Board was conscious that declining the proposal at this point would not allow views both for and against to be expressed
Michael Laws has predictably come out calling this an attack on democracy. Unfortunately for demagogues like Laws (fortunately for the rest of us) facts are not democratically determined. Facts are defined by their relationship to reality, not by their relationship to majority opinion. Democracy is good for a very large number of things, but it’s very poor indeed for determining matters of actual factual observable and demonstrable reality.
But the really important aspect of the NZGB’s release are the implications of the following two statements:
“Wanganui, the name given to the town to reflect its position near the mouth of the Whanganui River, was spelt incorrectly and has never been formally gazetted by this Board or its predecessors. It is therefore not currently an official New Zealand place name.â€
[…]
“While the Board acknowledges the historical transcription was based on the local pronunciation, the mechanics of standardising a previous unwritten language, together with its full meaning/translation, signal that the name was intended to be ‘Whanganui’. This is about correcting a mistake made more than 150 years ago.â€
In these statements Dr Don Grant suggests that a local council may not by simple fiat enshrine an error as a norm – the origin of that error matters, and if its correctness is disputed then the intention of those who originated it becomes relevant. This implies a burden of proof on those wanting to retain the current no-h spelling to demonstrate that those who originally spelt the name that way intended to do so – thereby coining a new word. That is an untenable position held only by those with no genuine arguments of merit, whose leader Laws stated that people who didn’t like the current spelling could go to `Fuckatanay’ (as he pronounced it), neatly highlighting the crass idiocy of the position.
It is also an important matter of precedence. My arguments have been based on the idea that the current spelling of `Wanganui’ is the correct spelling in law, while Dr Grant made quite clear that it has no legitimacy, having never been formally recognised by the body properly constituted to do so, which is not the Wanganui District Council. Because of this, the decision the NZGB needs to make is not whether to confirm the de jure status quo spelling as the settlers suggest, but whether to give the de facto spelling precedence over the de jure status quo, which (since no alternative spelling has been approved by the properly-constituted body) can only be Whanganui. The core of the settler position is this claim to the status quo, that possession is nine tenths of the law and that since the name is currently in settler possession it is theirs to define and use as they wish without consideration to others or to the historical, linguistic and geographic facts of the matter. The status quo in this case is clearly on the side of the h: if the settlers cannot convince the board of their claim it will not remain as Wanganui but will revert to the correct spelling. That’s a huge difference.
Submissions open in mid-May. If you have an argument you want heard on this, make a submission. The debate matters.
L
I apologise for my gratuitous use of Latin loan-terms in this post.
L
Well it’s less pretentious than throwing in random French-isms.
I simply feel that anything Laws opposes is right, by definition.
People get attached to their place and by association its name.
And we would all be having this debate, if it was not New Zealand and Aotearoa, but one or the other.
But on this issue – its either a correct spelling resulting in likely confusion over pronunciation, or an incorrect spelling and uniformly accurate pronunciation.
So Mikhail Hilaws of Wihanganui is not quite the hew haw ass he usually is. Whereas Johan Hibanks of Hauckland is always …
You have a very odd definition of settler… A settler is someone who comes from Place A to live in place B… A lot of the opposition comes from the residents… People who have lived, and their families, in Wanganui their entire life.. They are not Settlers.. They are Tangta Whenua.. The people of the land…
Ticked Off: You clearly haven’t read my previous posts on the matter, where I explain my use of the term. Hint: it’s not a matter of where they live or where they were born, it’s a matter of mindset.
L
Is that the next step for tree-huggers?
The simple solution would be for the maori et al to spell it with an H and the majority to spell it without.
jcuknz,
A simple solution, but not a useful solution. That’s exactly what I meant in the earlier post when I referred to enshrining ignorance, and a very neat precis of the settler mindset, viz: who cares, as long as I get my way?
L
That seems to me to be the maori midset too
jcuknz,
… except that the latter in this case is based on linguistic and historical fact, not the perpetuation of an error formed from ignorance. False equivocation does your case no favours.
L
Pingback: Kiwipolitico » Blog Archive » Submit!