Place-names—the names people give to communities and geographic features such as hills, mountains, rivers, lakes, and seas—forge communities, generate myths, affirm relationships, and establish claims. For linguists and historians place names provide clues about language and history. In many instances, place names may be allthat remain of the extinct language of the people who once inhabited a certain territory. Place-names—technically known as toponyms—can be classified as:
- Descriptive. Places are named for physical characteristics, including resemblances to parts of the human body, animals, or associated vegetation. Thus, we find names such as Beaverhead, Lone Pine, Strawberry Lake, Plentywood, and so on.
- Locational. These names provide locational information related to other features. Locational names may include up, down, this side, other side, upriver, downriver, offshore, inland, coastal. While European naming practices may include the cardinal directions (north, south, east, west), these are not found in American Indian place names.
- History, Mythology, Folklore. In many cultures, geographic features may be named for historic events and persons, and for mythological entities or events. In the United States, for example, it is common to name places for American Presidents and other political people, while American Indians did not generally name places for people.
Different languages may emphasize different geographic features in the naming process. In his book When Languages Dies: The Extinction of the World’s Languages and the Erosion of Human Knowledge, David Harrison writes:
“…which properties of the landscape people ultimately notice, name, and keep track of can be both enabled and mandated by the language they speak. Certain languages, due to a process of long adaptation to a landscape, will force their speakers to notice and specify certain properties such as direction of river flow.”
With regard to the importance of naming places, Felipe Fernández-Armesto, in his book Amerigo: The Man Who Gave His Name to America, writes:
“Naming is often said to be a kind of magic. Names change natures. They forge communities. They generate myths. They affirm relationships. They establish claims, especially of parentage and proprietorship. They affect perceptions of things named. They attract and repel. They are hard to get rid of. Their effects are almost indelible. They influence behavior, as people try to live up to them.”
Alistair Moffat, in his book Before Scotland: The Story of Scotland Before History, writes:
“The names of places sometimes remember who we were and how we used to see the world. They can chart changes and come to represent the cultural deposit of forgotten victories, political decisions based on the exercise of an ancient power by groups which were dominant at various periods in our history.”
In her book Ancestral Journeys, Jean Manco puts it this way:
“People may move and take their languages with them, but place-names are fixed to the territory. Thus they can provide clues to the sequence of languages spoken in a region.”
Place-names are long-lasting and may endure long after the people who gave the name have vanished from the landscape. Place names can, therefore, provide additional historical and linguistic background for many regions and countries. Geographer G. Malcolm Lewis, in his chapter in North American Exploration. Volume 1: A New World Disclosed, writes:
“Even now, after almost four hundred years of active Europeanization, approximately half the natural features of North America are officially known by native names or names of native derivation.”
Since place-names generally originate in spoken language, these names may provide evidence of early languages that pre-date writing. In some instances, such as that of Pictish in Scotland, much of what we know about the language today is based on place names. With regard to toponyms in North America, Patricia Afable and Madison Beeler, in their chapter in the Handbook of North American Indians, write:
“Names of particular topographical features frequently survive their source language by centuries and may shed light on the existence and distribution of dialects no longer spoken. In many parts of North America, toponyms of American Indian origin are often all that remain of a region’s aboriginal languages and are an important part of local historical lore.”
It is not uncommon to have place-names coined in one language and then, over time, the original language is replaced by another language and yet the place-name remains. The original names for valleys, villages, lakes, rivers, and mountains were often literal descriptions of these places. Over time, however, these descriptions came to be meaningless labels and thus could easily be absorbed by people speaking a different language. Thus, as different speaking people entered an area, they retained some of the old place names, or at least a version of these names which had been phonetically modified for their language. C. Hough, in an entry in the Encyclopedia of Languages & Linguistics, writes:
“River names have the highest survival rate, followed by the names of hills and mountains. Settlement names are usually younger, but may still be well over 1,000 years old, with minor names such as field and street names being among the most recent.”
Hydronymy is the technical term for river-names. Jean Manco writes:
“Though many European river-names are derived from specific Indo-European languages, the most ancient layer of hydronyms seems more generally Indo-European. This ‘Old European Hydronymy’ can be found scattered across the range of territory that Indo-Europeans are known to have settled: in Iberia north of the Tagus River, central Europe, Baltic and Slavic regions, Italy, Britain and Scandinavia, and also in Anatolia and India.”
Since the names of rivers tend to be the oldest, these names can provide linguists, historians, and archaeologists with some clues regarding ancient and historical population movements. Writing about Anglo-Saxon England, Caroline Alexander, in her book Lost Gold of the Dark Ages: War, Treasure, and the Mystery of the Saxons, reports:
“In England layers of place-names represent all the peoples who settled over the millennia: Celts, Romans, Anglo-Saxons, Vikings, and Normans. The survival of Celtic river names marks the extent of Anglo-Saxon settlement.”
In Scotland, linguists searched for a possible Celtic etymology for the Shin River and when they failed to find it, some suggested that the name Shin comes from a Proto-Indo-European root *sindu meaning “river.” It is supposed that the name for the Indus River also comes from this root. Not all linguists agree with the idea of an Old European Hydronymy: linguists such as Theo Venneman have suggested that some of these names are non-Indo-European. On the other hand, Jean Manco reports:
“Most linguists find an Indo-European origin more plausible.”
Place names are also an important part of cultural and national history. Geographer J. B. Harley, in a chapter in American Beginnings: Exploration, Culture, and Cartography in the Land of Norumbega, writes:
“Place-names have always been implicated in the cultural identity of the people who occupy the land. Naming a place anew is a widely documented act of political possession in settlement history. Equally, the taking away of a name is an act of dispossession.”
In a similar fashion, C. Hough writes:
“Naming is closely linked to possession, and it is not uncommon for places to be renamed to reinforce the authority of the ruling power.”
Toponyms can be generic and specific. The generic toponyms tell what kind of place it is. Endings in English such as –ville, and -burg are examples of generic toponyms.
In Irish Gaelic, some of the generic toponyms would include cill –pronounced “kill”--(church, as in Killarney, Kilkenny), bun (mouth of a river, as in Bunratty), ros (wood or headland, as in Roscommon), carraig (a rock, as in Carrickfergus), and cruach (rounded hill, as in Croagpatrick). As an aside, it should be mentioned that sometimes spelling changes, but the sound remains—cruach and croag, carraig and carrick.
In English, the Viking past can be seen in place names with –by, which referred to a village: Utterby (which combines the Old English uttrera meaning “remote” with the Viking –by to mean the “remote village.)” The Viking –thorpe indicated a secondary village or one of lesser importance. Thus, part of the Viking history of England can be seen in today’s place names.
Place-names can also provide information about religion. In his book A Brief History of the Vikings: The Last Pagans or the First Modern Europeans?, Jonathan Clements writes:
“Study of place names tells us that ancient people in what is now Denmark were more likely to worship Tyr. Worshippers of Ull, the archer, were once paramount in southern and central Sweden. Thor-worship became common all over Scandinavia, with the notable exception of the Trondheim region, whereas place names in honour of Odin are fare more widespread in Denmark and Sweden than in Norway or Iceland.”
The early Anglo-Saxon settlements tend to have place-names ending in –ham, such as Cleatham. These people carried out traditional ceremonies in open places and the suffixes leah or ley, referring to a grove or clearing, can be found today in names such as Thundersley, in Essex. Thundersley thus refers to the grove or clearing of Thunor (Thors).
Place-names may provide more than just historical and linguistic information about a place: the process of giving names to a place is a cultural process and the names provide clues about earlier cultures and their perception of their geographical environment. Patricia Afable and Madison Beeler write:
“Place-names reflect and to an important extent constitute a detailed, encyclopedic knowledge of the environment, and they have much to tell about how native peoples perceive, communicate about, and make use of their surroundings. Place-names provide insight about what areas, points, land routes, and waterways native people considered significant and how they organized their perceptions of their territory and space in general.”
Place-names not only anchor a culture to its physical environment, they also shape the way in which people think about and perceive this environment. The process of naming, and renaming, a place is a way of claiming it as one’s own. As the Europeans came to dominate North America, they renamed many of the features which they found. Peter Nabokov, in his book Where the Lightning Strikes: The Lives of American Indian Sacred Places, reports:
“Demonizing heathen places was long a Euro-Christian strategy in their spiritual conquest of the Americas.”
Nabokov also writes:
“Places where Indians lived and worshiped were often linked to the Prince of Darkness and his underworld.”
Most American Indian place-names refer to topographical features—tall pine trees, clearings without trees, big boulders, red rocks, green-colored lakes, river narrows, and so on. In general, Indians did not name places after people as this would have negative consequences for the soul of the deceased.
With regard to etymology, the word “toponym” is a fairly recent creation dating to 1939 and was formed by combining the Greek “topos” meaning “place” with “onym” meaning name.
The scientific study of names and naming is onomastics. The noun “onomastics” came into use in 1936 from the adjective “onomastic,” which originates from the French “onomastique,” which comes from the Greek “onomastikos” meaning “of or belonging to naming.”
In the United States, by the way, place names are standardized by the U.S. Board of Geographic Places which is associated with the U.S. Geological Survey. The Board wants geographic names to be as precise, short and as easily pronounceable as possible. In addition, names cannot be regarded as offensive to any gender, or racial, ethnic, or religious group. The use of apostrophes in names, which indicate possession of the feature, are discouraged.
Language 101/201
Language 101/201 is a series of essays about various aspects of language. Language 201 is a revision and expansion of an early essays. Some of the essays from this series:
Language 101: Language Change
Language 201: The Indo-European Language Family
Language 101: The Search for Origins
Language 101: "Body Language"