Dear Editor,
At the risk of facing a charge of plagiarism (to which I shall happily plead guilty and throw myself on the mercy of the court) I state that the letter from Mr Leon O Rockcliffe entitled ‘Of friends and halls and hope’ in Stabroek News, 11th September, I found quite interesting in its presentation but more so interesting in the implications of its content. I read it thrice.
Like Mr Rockcliffe, I am somewhat concerned over “interference” with our geographical nomenclature. As a child, I used to visit many, many places on the coastland during the August holiday Sunday School treats that used to be organized by various churches. Too, I used to go for short holidays by bus along dusty, burnt-earth roads with two strips of concrete along the middle, on the East Coast, the Essequibo Coast and the Corentyne coast, and by the RH Carr steamer to Mackenzie. On all these trips, I used to be intrigued by the names of places I passed or visited, sometimes noting that two places far apart from each other had the same name and the same spelling. There were, too, the local variant pronunciations, and the sometimes individualized spelling provided by village councils on the receipts they issued.
When and how did the Courantyne River of my Sacred Heart RC Boys’ School days become the Corentyne River? We all knew of Traspay, even though the teacher spelt it Strathspey. I got a shock in 1967 when, while doing a research paper at UG, I discovered that the village of Grove on the East Bank of Demerara is really Golden Grove. Like Mr Rockcliffe, I have experienced the Non Pareil/Non Pariel difficulty and the Klein Pouderoyen/Klien Pouderoyen difficulty. I am intrigued by the blatant and bare-faced efforts to refer to Babu John as Babu Jhaan. But, what’s in a name? What’s in a name?
A J Seymour in his ‘Name Poem’ has his own comment. He says:
Beauty about us in the breathe of names
Known to us all, but murmured over softly
Woven to breath of peace.
If but a wind blows, all their beauty wakes.
Mr Rockcliffe’s letter teased me back to my bookshelf to my copies of Gazetteer of Guyana – the 1974 edition that I had bought from Austin’s Book Services on Church Street, and the 2001 edition that I had bought at the Lands and Surveys Department on Upper Hadfield Street ‒ to check his statements about Hope, Hopetown, Good Hope, and Hall, and to note differences among the three presentations. The exercise was exciting, stimulating, rewarding. For “If but a wind blows, all their beauty wakes”.
Like Mr Rockcliffe, I can do no less than acknowledge the usefulness and recommend the acquisition by every family (or organization of repute) of at least one copy of that most valuable source of geographical information, namely, Gazeteer of Guyana published and sold by the Guyana Lands and Surveys Commission, D’Urban Backlands, Georgetown, at the most charitable price of $5,000.
Plagiarism? Guilty – but with explanation!
Yours faithfully,
George N Cave
