It’s no good is it? I saw the BBC announcers last night looking at the audience very seriously while straining to pronounce the name. The WEE-gurs just aren’t going to get any love, on top of which they come from some place beginning with X. That just about kills it. The kind of people who would support them would also be terminally embarrassed about pronouncing the place wrong. Best just to let it go by. Apart from Xinjiang being a Chinese name, I bet this is why activists are so keen on replacing it with East Turkestan. If they can get people to do that in the West then they might get some traction.
Consider Tibet, by contrast. T vowel b vowel t. It works in any combination. Tubit, Tabot, it’s all fluffy. It’s euphonious, pleasing to get your mouth round and it evokes Hobbits – and that’s without all the Shangrila stuff as a bonus. How can you not like Tibetans? They’re basically human pandas, as has been pointed out. The Chinese name - Xizang - would be a mouth stopper but it's far to late to get that imposed now.
But the photos I've seen look very much like Kazakhstan, and the people look like the people there. So East Turkestan is not so far off the mark.
Posted by: Cheryl Rofer | July 09, 2009 at 12:31 AM
They’re basically human pandas, as has been pointed out.
Funny you should say that.
"Uighurs are spoiled like pandas. When they steal, rob, rape or kill, they can get away with it. If we Han did the same thing, we'd be exected," shop owner Li Yufang told Reuters.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/jul/08/uighur-china-protests-ethnic-violence
Posted by: Richard J | July 09, 2009 at 10:34 AM
Gosh, so the eats, shoots and leaves story wasn't just a joke.
Posted by: ajay | July 09, 2009 at 03:45 PM
their language is also closely related to kazakh.
when i was in uzbekistan, the local food was god-awful. the best restaurants were the ones that sold uighur cuisine. among the expats in tashkent, i bet there's a lot of uighur sympathy. they're used to hearing "WEE-gurs". it means good food
Posted by: upyernoz | July 10, 2009 at 05:17 PM
but how exactly IS it pronounced? this is one of those things that you still can't google.
Posted by: alle | July 10, 2009 at 06:19 PM
It's just struck me that "Xinjiang" translates into Russian, roughly, as "Ukraine" - they're both words meaning "border (of the Empire)". And the Han in Xinjiang are roughly as numerous and in roughly the same position as the Russian-speaking Ukrainians.
Posted by: dsquared | July 11, 2009 at 12:21 AM
All the former soviet central Asian republics bar Tajikistan are majority Turkic-language speaking. After the Soviet Union's collapse, Turkey did try and promote pan_Turkism initially with limited success.
Perhaps I might crowbar in here a quote from F.A.Ridley's The Assassins, his comparison of the unorthodox Ismaili cult founded by Hasan-ibn-Sabah and Trotsky's Fourth International:
"The perogatives[sic] of 'the Commander of the Faithful' were increasingly usurped by barborous Turkish mercenaries,-as inept at government, religion,or anything else except war, as Turks have down to our own day usually demonstrated themselves to be".
Posted by: skidmarx | July 11, 2009 at 01:23 PM
the Han in Xinjiang are roughly as numerous and in roughly the same position as the Russian-speaking Ukrainians.
Is this right as far as economic position is concerned though? Unless I misunderstand things, the Han in Xinjiang are disproportionately among the more economically privileged strata of society which I don't believe is especially true of Russian-speaking Ukranians. (Of course I may be wrong on either point.)
Posted by: ejh | July 12, 2009 at 07:16 PM
dsquared: Ukraine=Xinjiang=Krajina, of course, another area with interesting ethnic/settlement politics. (Come to that, doesn't "Wales" mean something similar too?)
Posted by: ajay | July 13, 2009 at 11:02 AM
As does Wallachia, I think.
Posted by: Richard J | July 13, 2009 at 11:17 AM
A spokesman for the Uighur-American Association on C-Span yesterday said that Xinjiang translates as "new territory".
Posted by: skidmarx | July 13, 2009 at 12:25 PM
The "Wal" of Wales, Cornwall, Wallonia and 'walnut' means 'foreign' rather than 'borderland'; in the British examples it's the area beyond the borderland, and basically translates as "here be dragons". The English Krajina is the Marches (from an old Germanic word for 'border'). Not sure where the Walloons got the name - they've always struck me as rather ordinary French people shifted a bit up and to the right.
Wallachia is different - home of the Vlachs.
Something else I learned recently - nobody in the region has ever referred to "Austria" as "southern land", which is what the name means in Latin; it's just a mistransliteration of Österreich, which means "eastern kingdom".
Posted by: Phil | July 13, 2009 at 01:10 PM
Which, interestingly, started off as the Ostmark before its progressive (re-[1])Germanisation in the early part of the last millennium.
[1] Depending on how much credence you're willing to give to the Roman's analysis about them lot over the Rhine and Danube.
Posted by: Richard J | July 13, 2009 at 01:15 PM
Wiki seems to think that Xinjiang means "New Frontier" or "New Territory". And also says that the final conquest of the region by the Manchus in 1876 was backed by loans from British banks - we were worried about the Russians, you see...
Posted by: ajay | July 13, 2009 at 03:01 PM
in 1876 was backed by loans from British banks - we were worried about the Russians, you see...
I didn't know this, but my immediate reaction was 'ah, of course...'
Posted by: Richard J | July 13, 2009 at 03:04 PM
I really should reread Peter Hopkirk, I think.
Posted by: ajay | July 13, 2009 at 04:43 PM