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Re: OT: Place name constituents

From:Jim Henry <jimhenry1973@...>
Date:Friday, May 19, 2006, 16:06
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 When an old route is superseded by a newer (straighter, better paved, or whatever), the old one might be renamed with "Old" in its name -- e.g. "Old Norcross Road" and "Old Conyers Road"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

Replies

taliesin the storyteller <taliesin-conlang@...>[CONLANG] Place name constituents
Ph.D. <phil@...>
Wesley Parish <wes.parish@...>