Reply #268: Of course, 'Baghdad' isn't an Arabic word. [View All]

[Igel]

It's Persian, in fact.

In fact, al-Anbar used to be the name of Fallujah (so I guess 'Anbar' is the 'proper name' of that Iraqi city). A nice Persian word, I've been told.

I wonder what the *real* proper name of all these places are, you know, what they were called before the Europeans got to the area known as 'California' and set up the empire later inherited by the government in Mexico City, or before the Arabs and Persians got to the area now known as 'Iraq'. But the former search for the 'proper name' ultimately get us to asking who the first settlers were were in the area--they certainly had language--while the latter forces us to ponder whether Neandertals had language, whether archaic humans did, or if the early modern humans that displaced the Neandertals bothered to give those locals any name at all.