OUR PLACE NAMES.

Auckland Star, Volume LIX, Issue 255, 27 October 1928, Page 8

OUR PLACE NAMES.

An Englishman with a grievance Jias written to a Wellington paper painfully bewailing the fondness pf New Zealandera for Mnori place names in preference to "name* from their own language." He considers it very lin-ljritish. This W an old and much-discussed subject, the naming of rivers and lakes and towns, and the great body of ppblio opinion in New Zealand lias been in favour pf adopting the olden 'Maori names wherever possible. There are places that persist in wearing the ijlrfitting old clothes of English names in the teeth of common sense. No need to mtentjon more than two—Pal mere ton North and Poverty Bay. There are English-named places such as Mercer which no one would wish to alter, for it has historical warrant; and there are many of Cook** names, whjch are descriptively just the thing, such as Gable End Foreland and Cape Turnagajn. flqt Ifew Zealandera haye come to loyp Waikato and Tauiaki and Waitangi, Taupiri and Taranaki with exactly the degree pf aVectjon whiph the trup-wom finglishnian holds for hie Salisbury and Winchester, his jStpk* Pogea and Windermere. Ours n't the country.; they havp poetry and tradition just as the immemorial names of England have theirs. We could not better Manapouri or Waikaremoana, but we certainly could find a moFe satiefaetoi-y name than Poverty even from a Commercial point of view; and it would not be difficult to improve on I|e)e|)eville.

The newspaper letter writer mentipped cites the U.S.A. as a pattern to follow in the adoption of the place names of Old England. Here, again, he certainly seems to hold the weak end of the stick. He considers it an admirable thipg that America h»s so many names qf Epgligji towns. He might have gone fprther and pointed tq the Homes epd Athens pnc| Parities w|th which the U.S.A. map is studded, gut it opp scarcely be claimed that there is either beauty or local fitness or even historical interest in the vest majority pf names transplanted from the Old World ta the New. On the other hand, consider some of the names borrowed frqm the Red Indian, a poet as well as a warrior: ghasta, Oregon, Shenandoph> Wyoming. Minnesota, Missouri, Opptjia (quite Mam thpt!), Ohio, Potomac, Merripmc, Tennessee. They are of the soil, the forest, they suggest the rolling rivers, the far-stretching mountains. Just as ip New Zealand, there are pleasing English names that bold their stories of pioneers apd fragrant memories of remote English origins. Put the English-descended citizen of the U.S.A. and Canada wppld no more dream of changing Mississippi or Athabasca than the New Zealander would of exchanging familiar Maori for something from the other end' of the world and alien to the soil and tlje spjrjt pf the land. —J C.