Evro? Ewro? Euras? Eira? Eoró? Ευρώ? Евро? Avro? (1)

What a brilliant idea it must have seemed at the time: calling the new single European currency after the continent. After all, what could be a more universal name? OK, there was that niggling difference between ‘Europa‘ (the commonest name for the continent in the languages of the EU) and ‘Europe‘ (actually only used in two of them – English and French), but that could be circumvented by dropping the last two letters. And euro- was already in common use as a prefix: Eurovision, eurodollars and so on. Simple, right?

Well, not quite. As the EU steadily expanded beyond its original heartland, it incorporated more and more countries where the continent was called something slightly different. Either the problem was simply overlooked, or else it was briefly considered and then shunted aside as typical linguists’ nitpicking. If the Slovenes and Czechs called the place Evropa and the Maltese called it Ewropa, so what? It was only one letter’s difference….

But then there was this member state – one of the earliest – that used a completely different alphabet: Greece, where Europe was called Ευρώπη (pronounced Evrópi). And the Greek alphabet was surely a fundamental element in European culture. So was it to be dismissed out of hand? The idea of imposing the Latin alphabet on Greece after all these millennia cannot have sat well with the EU’s claims to cultural diversity and tolerance. In the upshot, the letters EURO on the new banknotes were ‘echoed’ in (admittedly less prominent) Greek capital letters: ΕΥΡΩ. Luckily the use of the Greek letter omega (Ω, familiar to other Europeans if only from the Swiss watch logo) rather than omicron (Ο) made clear that this was Greek and not some bizarre word EYPO: eh-poh? But this was just the first of many hurdles.

At some point it must have occurred to someone that Europe also had a third alphabet, called Cyrillic – which would have to be considered if Bulgaria, Serbia, Macedonia or parts of the former Soviet Union (including Ukraine, and Russia itself) ever joined the EU. In 2007 Bulgaria did – and the sparks instantly began to fly. The Bulgarians naturally wanted the name of the currency to appear on the banknotes in their own alphabet alongside the other two – but since their name for Europe was Европа (pronounced Evrópa), they wanted to call the currency the евро (pronounced évro). No way, cried the European Commission and the European Central Bank in horrified unison, we can’t have that – the name of the currency must look and sound identical throughout Europe. But we’ll let you call it the еуро (pronounced é-uro).

Nonsense, said the Bulgarians – that combination of letters is completely alien to our language, and it bears no relation to our name for Europe. Since you’ve already let the Greeks base their name for the currency (ευρώ, pronounced evró) on their own word for Europe, we insist on no less. And anyway the name of the currency doesn’t sound identical even in your alphabet. In English it’s pronounced ‘yoo-ro’, in French and Dutch ‘ö-ro’, in Spanish and Italian ‘é-uro’ (as you wanted us to call it), in German ‘oy-ro’ and so on – all depending on how the word for Europe is pronounced locally. So get a life, and stop trying to meddle with our language! The linguistically challenged Commission and ECB backed down; and although Bulgaria has not yet actually joined the euro zone, EURO and ΕΥΡΩ will be echoed on forthcoming euro banknotes in (admittedly even less prominent) Cyrillic capital letters: ЕВРО. A second hurdle.

But even European languages written in the Latin alphabet have all kinds of unsuspected pitfalls. The test case was Latvia, where Europe isn’t called Euro-anything, but Eiropa. So the Latvians naturally said they had no option but to call the currency something beginning with ei-. This time the powers-that-be were sterner (perhaps because there are over 7 million Bulgarians but only 2 million Latvians), saying in effect ‘Whatever concessions we’ve had to make to people with different alphabets, you Latvians use the same Latin alphabet as we do, so you’ll call it the euro and that’s that!’ No, said the Latvians, that combination of letters is alien to our language, and the name would have nothing to do with Europe as we know it. And we have another problem, which doesn’t arise in Bulgaria – nouns in our language have cases. That means the form of the name must be able to change according to its grammatical function, otherwise we can’t deal with it. Even a word such as eiro – let alone euro – would not fit into Latvian grammar, and the only acceptable form would in fact be eira.

By now some people in Brussels must have been wondering whether euro was such a brilliant choice of name after all. I’m also struck by the fact that the greatest pressure on Latvia to give in and say euro came from the Dutch presidency of the EU in late 2004. The Dutch take a notoriously cavalier attitude to languages, including their own. More and more of their higher education is in English rather than Dutch, to the severe detriment of its quality – but they seem not to care much, and tend to view other countries’ insistence on correct use of their languages as quaint, not to say chauvinistic.

Enter Lithuania, where Europe is simply called Europa; but here the ‘case problem’ is, if anything, more acute. Only a small number of endings are allowed for the basic form of nouns, and -o is not one of them. The only acceptable form is euras, and euro could only mean ‘of the euro’ (the genitive case). Lithuanian even adapts foreign names to fit into its grammar and orthography: Barakas Huseinas Obama, Tonis Bleras, Fransua Olandas and so on. Once again Brussels and Frankfurt have huffed and puffed, presumably muttering under their breaths ‘These bloody people with their complicated languages!’ Unity in diversity, yeah….

It gets worse. Ireland has two official languages, English and Irish. The Irish word for Europe is Eoraip (pronounced, more or less, ‘Oh-rap’). Which vowels can be combined with which is of crucial importance to Irish spelling, and here again euro would be a totally meaningless, unpronounceable alien import. So the Irish word for the euro, derived from Eoraip, is eoró (pronounced, more or less, ‘oh-ro’). Luckily for Ireland, the Irish language has only minimal official status in the EU, and by now European officials are presumably sick and tired of all the squabbling, so Ireland has been left in peace (on this score at least).

But Ireland has introduced a quirk of its own. The question of how to write the plural of EURO on the banknotes was always a problem, since some languages use a plural ending with currencies but others do not. French, English, Spanish and Portuguese add -s (francs, pounds, pesetas, escudos), Dutch and German add nothing (gulden, frank, Mark, Schilling, Franken), Italian adds whichever vowel is appropriate depending on the ending of the word (lire, franchi) and so on. In the end it was decided to leave both EURO and CENT in the singular form on all the notes and coins, which flies in the face of English grammar (we say and write five pounds and twenty dollars, not five pound or twenty dollar, so things like 5 EURO and 50 CENT are quite simply broken English). But since that was how the names appeared on the new currency, the government of Ireland (the only English-language country to initially adopt the euro – true to type, Britain said no) officially advised its citizens to refer to them that way. There have been protests in Ireland that ‘the EU has no right to try and change English grammar’, but Irish people (including my British stepbrother who lives in Dublin) are more inclined than other English-speakers to use the singular forms.

And – a much bigger wasps’ nest – what if Turkey ever joins the EU? The further away you get from the centre of Europe, the less like ‘Europe’ its name becomes – and in Turkish (which uses our same Latin alphabet) it’s Avrupa. So logic would demand that the currency be known there as the avru. The Turkish media have generally adopted the un-Turkish spelling euro, but the country’s vigilant language authorities are pressing for the more Turkish spelling avro (already a compromise). A fourth spelling of the name on the banknotes – well, why not? EURO – ΕΥΡΩ – ЕВРО – AVRO. Back in Soviet days the names of ruble banknotes appeared in the languages of all fifteen Union republics (Russian, Ukrainian, Belorussian, Uzbek, Kazakh, Georgian, Azeri, Lithuanian, Moldavian, Latvian, Kirgiz, Tajik, Armenian, Turkmen and Estonian) and hence four different alphabets (Cyrillic, Latin, Georgian and Armenian). And the Soviets let the various republics use their own local word for the currency. So in some places it was the manat, in others the som, and in Ukraine it was the karbóvanets – names that all survived the collapse of the USSR. I always felt the EU should have let its member states do the same thing – so we would still have had the ancient names franc, mark, lira, crown, drachma and all the rest.

An added complication is the division of the euro into cents, for in many of Europe’s languages the word cent and its plural are more or less unpronounceable – another problem that was presumably overlooked. In German-speaking countries, a word beginning with ce should normally have a ts sound – but because people are familiar with the American cent they now usually say sent rather than tsent. The southern European countries have acted as if the word cent on the coins is simply an abbreviation of their own native words centime (French), centesimo (Italian), céntimo (Spanish) and cêntimo or centavo (Portuguese), which is how everyone there refers to the coins. And since in Greek the sound group nt simply does not exist, the old subdivision of the drachma, the λεπτό (pronounced leptó), has been revived and appears on the reverse (national) side of all the coins – evidently with the blessing of the European Commission and the ECB. Greeks always refer to the subdivisions of the euro as leptá – the unpronounceable cent(s) is never used.

But all this may of course become moot if the euro itself collapses….