Re: OT: Place name constituents

On 5/19/06, Carsten Becker <carbeck@...> wrote:

> I wanted to add some flavour to my maps and thus thought
> about elements that can occur in place names. In German
> place names for example, some common elements are -burg
> (-castle/-burg), -berg (-hill), -stadt (-town), -ingen
> (??), -hausen/-heim (??), -born/-brunn (spring), -feld(en)
Don't forget modifiers -- Old, New, East, West, Great,
Little, ... E.g. when China Mieville calls his metropolis
"New Crobuzon" he immediately gives you a sense
of history, because you can infer it was named for an
older city or settlement called Crobuzon, even though
he never (as yet) has told us where or when that was.

When an old route is superseded by a newer (straighter,
better paved, or whatever), the old one might be renamed
with "Old" in its name -- e.g. "Old Norcross Road" and
"Old Conyers Road" around here.

One of the spiffiest bits of place-name conlangery is
the name of a ford in _The Phoenix Guards_ by
Steven Brust.  I can't cite it because my copy is loaned
out; basically the aboriginals called it simply "ford"
in their language, and each people who came along
and grabbed the land after them took the previous name,
perhaps mangled it to fit their own language's
phonology, and added their own language's word
for "ford".  I think the final name was something like
"Bengloalafurd", but I suspect I'm misspelling it because
this only gets on Ghit.

--
Jim Henry
http://www.pobox.com/~jimhenry

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