RB Rail opts to use incorrect form of Rail Baltic name in Estonia
RB Rail AS, the joint venture established to oversee the Rail Baltic high-speed railway project, has decided to start using the incorrect name form "Rail Baltica" in its official statements in Estonia.
RB Rail is not using the incorrect name form accidentally in its official statements, Kadri Lainas, a partner at Akkadian, the communication agency offering communications services for the railway, told BNS. Rather, it has been centrally decided in Riga to use the same name form across all three Baltic countries.
Lainas added that there had been no direct discussion with her n the use of the incorrect name form. "I presume that they have worked it through, that they have decided that it is like a brand name, and I think that when it comes to brand names, the owner has the right to decide on how they want it to be written and declined [in the Estonian language] — also based on the rules of the Estonian language," she explained.
RB Rail communications chief Ilze Rassa said that using the name form common in Latvia and Lithuania in all three Baltic countries enables to better market the project internationally. She also said that international brands are sometimes better if their names include a mistake.
Rassa said that RB Rail's supervisory board, which has been led since this summer by Latvian Edvīns Bērziņš and includes two people each from Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, decided to use the name form common for Latvians and Lithuanians in Estonia as well.
In language advice published on its website, however, the Institute of the Estonian Language has said that the name form used in the Estonian language should remain Rail Baltic.
The linguistic presentation of names should be in accordance with the rules of the specific language, the institute said. For example, in the Latin composite name Via Baltica, which in translation means the "Baltic (high)way," the adjective Baltica has a female suffix -a, as the preceding noun, "via," is female.
According to the institute, the English word "rail" can only be combined with the Latin root "Baltic" as an English adjective, with no gender suffixes from other languages added to it. Thus, the correct name form is Rail Baltic, which does not seek to combine elements from different languages, the institute noted.
In the Estonian language, Rail Baltic is written in Roman type and declined with an -u, for example the genitive "Rail Balticu" and partitive "Rail Balticut."
When speaking about Rail Baltic in Latvia and Lithuania, the name form Rail Baltica is used.
RB Rail is a joint venture established by the three Baltic countries in October 2014. The Rail Baltic project seeks to establish a direct railway connection between the Baltic states and the European railway network enabling speeds of up to 240 kilometers per hour for passenger trains and 120 kilometers per hour for freight trains.
Editor: Aili Vahtla
Source: BNS