Dots, squiggles, Szekspir and the future

It was one of those simple and devastatingly difficult email requests. "Please find a thumbnail-sized symbol for eastern Europe."

What encapsulates the former captive nations? A broken hammer and sickle? Not only passé, but inaccurate. My patch includes ex-Yugoslavia and Albania, which were only briefly in the Soviet camp. I thought of candles and flags, the symbols of the collapse of Communism. But they seem dated 16 years on. Churches with onion domes? Not eastern enough, and what about protestant Estonia? I toyed with the idea of a map. But it would be hopelessly cramped in the format. I thought of shooting stars, to illustrate economic growth. Or frayed, tatty stars, to show messy politics. Or both.

Then I got another email. "By the way: no stars please." The European Union’s flag, it seems, was needed in another branding exercise elsewhere.

I carried on thinking, in wilder and more fanciful directions. The potato, perhaps: the symbol of the hearty peasant cuisine that stretches from the Baltic to the Black Sea. Accurate, but unflattering and a bit hypocritical coming from a Brit.

Then a colleague hit on the perfect idea. What really unites all the post-communist countries is their alphabets. Every one is different. Every one has letters that look intimidating and unfamiliar to the western eye. Estonian has the õ, Latvian the ?, Lithuanian the ?, Polish the infernally similar ? and ?, not to mention the ?; the Czechs have the ?, the Slovaks the ? and the Hungarians the ?. I could go on, but you get the point. The countries that use Cyrillic have their own non-standard letters too.

There is a political dimension to this. Westerners who pride themselves on a pedantic use of the German umlaut or the French cedilla and always put the accent on Chávez and Guantánamo, blithely ignore the crucial diacritical marks in the languages of the new Europe. They are too complicated; too difficult, too unfamiliar.

But they do matter. Imagine if the Anglophone world was told that the letter ‘w’ would henceforth be substituted by the easy-to-understand ‘v’, and that ‘th’ would in future be a simpler ‘t’. Ve vould not tink tat vas vorkable.

Estonia’s national anthem, for example, starts: "Mu isamaa, mu õnn ja rõõm" [My fatherland, my happiness and joy]. Leave out the vital diacritical mark and the last words become, comically "onn ja room" [roughly: small hut and crawl].

Admittedly, it cuts both ways. There is still a tendency in the post-communist world to ‘localise’ spellings. Lithuanians refer to the president of the United States as Džordžas Volkeris Buöas. There is a partial excuse for that - Lithuanian needs an ending with ‘s’ in order to decline male surnames correctly. But it is mostly a legacy of past provincialism, which thinks foreign names are too difficult unless transcribed phonetically into the local language. When your correspondent was a student in Poland in the mid-1980s, he was surprised to see the author of Makbet was Szekspir.

Such oddities are diminishing. The easterners have learnt, mostly, to spell western names properly. But not vice versa. I will believe that western Europe really takes its new neighbours seriously when the media and politicians there start adopting the elementary courtesies of spelling names right.

But why is the new logo needed? Because Wilder Europe is migrating to economist.com, which is launching a daily column; this one will appear on Thursdays, plus new logo. The same piece will continue to appear in European Voice - but with a suitably anonymous sign-off.

• The author is central and eastern Europe correspondent of The Economist.

It was one of those simple and devastatingly difficult email requests. "Please find a thumbnail-sized symbol for eastern Europe."

• Primary Source