Camestros Felapton

FELAPTONL

Language and placenames

This random musing is based on this comment by Steven French in the Bede post. I wanted to illustrate his point and it made me think of place names around where I grew up. It’s a very crowded bit of England for place names and even small villages often have even smaller place names contained within them. However, here are the stops on the Liverpool-Wigan train line (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liverpool%E2%80%93Wigan_line) [simplified]

  • Liverpool Lime Street | Old English meaning muddy pool (“Lime Street” was named in the 18th century after Lime Kilns that were there)
  • Edge Hill | Modern English, Georgian era suburb of Liverpool
  • Wavertree Technology Park | Old English meaning wavering tree. Obviously “technology park” is very very Modern English 🙂
  • Broad Green | I assume Modern English
  • Roby | Norse meaning a type of village
  • Huyton | Old English probably
  • Prescot | Old English meaning a priest’s cottage
  • Eccleston Park | “Eccleston” is an interesting one. There are three places called Eccleston in the North-West (and lots of people). The “ton” bit is a common Old English bit for town. Wikipedia says ‘from either the Latin ecclesia or the Welsh eglwys, both meaning “church”‘.
  • Thatto Heath | “Heath” is Modern English and was added later. Thatto is apparently Old English for ‘fountain, water-pipe and conduit’ https://images.liverpoolmuseums.org.uk/2020-01/St-Helens-Part-6.pdf
  • St Helens Central | Modern English
  • Garswood, suburban station (for Ashton-in-Makerfield) | Old English (from fir wood)
  • Bryn | Cumbric for hill or possibly later Welsh for hill (bryn is Modern welsh for hill) but Wikipedia also suggests it might be from Old English “bryne” for a burning fire.
    • Ashton-in-Makerfield is a whole mix of stuff. Ashton is Old English and “Makerfield” (the name for the general area) is a mix of Celtic and Old English.
    • Ince Moss Junction | Wikipedia has Ince as another Cumbric/Welsh name meaning an island or dry land. There’s another Ince in Chesire.
  • Wigan North Western | Wikipedia has a lot on the name but it’s a bit mixed “The name Wigan is probably a Celtic place-name : it might be a diminutive form of Brittonic *wīg “homestead, settlement” (later Welsh gwig).[6][7] It has also been suggested directly a Celtic personal name Wigan, a name corresponding to Gaulish Vicanus, Old Welsh Uuicant or Old Breton Uuicon.[8] plus the nominal suffix -an has also been suggested (c.f. numerous places in France named Le Vigan).” Weirdly the next paragraph then says it has nothing to do with Le Vigan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wigan There is a longer article here discussing the general lack of knowledge for the name but suggesting it was named after somebody with a Celtic name https://www.wiganarchsoc.co.uk/content/History/WhoWasWigan.html

So mainly Old English, some Modern English, a lot less Norse than I expected and more Celtic/Cumbric/Welsh than I expected.

camestrosfelapton

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56 responses to “Language and placenames”

  1. Just in case you ever have occasion to discuss the Ninth Doctor again, note that his actor is spelled the same as the park here. (I’ve seen you consistently adding a superfluous E to the end.)

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      • Eh, Some names are like that. One of the places I need to contact for work purposes has Livingstone as part of its name. The e at the end appears and disappears in correspondence so often it’s practically blinking. I tend to get that one right, but I can never write Dufferin, another locale, without adding a g at the end and having to go back and fix.

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  3. I was also a bit surprised by how few Norse names there are, especially since the Vikings were booted out of Dublin & you’d expect them to have ended up just across the water. But maybe they were all pining for the fjords (!) and headed for the Lake District instead – last night’s insomnia took me to a post by someone who had mapped out Norse place-name suffixes (e.g. -kirk) and, unsurprisingly, most of them sit within the Danelaw, with the notable exception of all the -thwaites (meaning field or meadow) which are almost all around the lakes, with a few outliers in North Yorkshire (+ variants in Normandy, of course): Mapping Vikings Through British Isles Placenames https://jalapic.github.io/vikings

    (I’ll forego mentioning the results of my early hours Wikipedia delving about Eccles cakes …)

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    • The map (at jalapic) misses out the -by names in Dumfriesshire (where the variant spelling -bie is used). There is a cluster of -by names on the Wirral.

      It doesn’t turn up in settlement names, but -ness is common in western Scotland (in the Gaelicised form -nish). Wiktionary gives the etymology of ness (as a noun) as Old English, from a proto-Germanic root, and with cognates in other Germanic languages. I would have thought that it’s survival in Modern English (to the degree that it does survive) would be more due to Norse influence. Inverness is obviously a coincidence. Neston (on the Wirral) could be English, Norse, or coincidence – Wikipedia says Norse.

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      • Good point. And the Wirral is where it is speculated Aethelstan defeated an alliance of Vikings, Scots and Britons, thereby forging England’s ‘national identity’.

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      • I’m a little confused: isn’t Inverness (Gaelic Inbhir Nis) “the mouth of the River Ness”? Which, I can attest from my ownself, it is. It was Gaelicized pretty early, despite being so far east. Note the Gaelic form is pronounced “nish”, like all the other places ending in -nish. You can’t throw a rock in the west and Inner Hebrides without hitting a nish. Skye, for example, has a bunch of them — most of the peninsulas.

        What it was in Pictish, I dunno. Nobody knows what it was called in Neolithic times, but likely always “the mouth of this here river”.

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        • “The hydronym Ness is of Pictish origin. The name may be derived from *Nessa, the name of a river goddess. *Nessa preserves an Old Celtic *Nesta, with roots in Indo-European ned, “water”, from which the Greek hydronyms Neda and Nestos are descended.” (Wikipedia)

          This is a different origin from the majority of -ness and -nish placenames, which come from Norse or Old English ness, which comes “From Middle English nesse (in placenames), from Old English ness, næss, from Proto-Germanic *nasją (“promontory; ness”); cognate with Middle Low German nes, Icelandic nes, Swedish näs, Danish næs. Related to nose.” (Wiktionary)

          I have presumed that Naze (Essex) and Nose (several in the West Country) in headland names has the same origin, but in the West Country at least, from Old English rather than Norse.

          For comparison, in Gaelic, sron (anglicised strone), meaning nose, is used for short lateral ridges of mountains. (The Irish form is spelled with o-acute, the Scottish with o-grave.) Wiktionary gives promontory/headland as a secondary meaning in Scots Gaelic, but when I spent time in the Highlands I saw it more in the ridge sense.

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  4. The modern Welsh equivalent of Ince is ynys. Irish Gaelic uses inish, and it’s fossilised in Scottish place names as inch. I’d suspect the Scots Gaelic eilean (mostly replacing innis) and Manx ellan of being borrowings from Norse, though Norse uses the second morpheme here rather less that the West Germanic languages do.

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  5. This particular St Helens has a slightly weird etymology. It’s a plural, not a possessive. But it’s not two different Saints Helen (which would be SS. Helen), its the same saint twice.

    There were two adjacent parish churches that were both dedicated to the same Saint Helen, so the town that encompassed both came to be known as “the Saint Helens” and then “Saint Helens”.

    Also, when you grew up in the area it would have been “Saint Helens Shaw Street” station – Shaw deriving from Old English for a small wood or copse.

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  6. ‘By’ means village or hamlet – Roby could be either calm or tranquil village, or it could be associated to rowing (att ro = to row). Now, a tranquil village, a place to rest, is a more logical-sounding name for a village. Oth, Norse were famously disingenuous when naming places, c.f. Greenland, where the best one could say is that it was indeed a piece of land.

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    • Or farmstead. So Wetherby, just up the road, means farm of the castrated male sheep. I guess the sheep worked his way up from the bottom of the flock … good for him!

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      • I’d presume that most farms would have at least one castrated male sheep, even if they probably killed most of the males for veal. So I wonder what set this one apart to get that name.

        (Insert “Animal Farm”, “Charlotte’s Web”, and “Babe” references here.)

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        • Veal is calf meat. Lamb meat is lamb. (It’s said that nowadays sheep meat is lamb unless the animal died of old age.)

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          • Although mostly lamb is still under 2 years old, and in the US they just don’t sell much mutton, because it’s not cost-effective for the mass market. Only in more “ethnic” cuisines in the US do you get sheep meat over 2 years old.

            If I wanted really proper lamb/mutton, I’d have to go to the halal butcher shops or else the Mexican ones. (Same for goat, but I’ve never liked goat meat at any age.)

            Or else deal with the massive air miles and non-freshness of OZ/NZ sheep.

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          • I went to wikipedia (Lamb_and_mutton) for definitions and it appears that just as with bacon, what is called what varies according to place and time. Generally speaking, up to two years old it’s lamb, beyond two years old it’s mutton (ewes or whethers).

            Here in southern Sweden, a friend who had a few sheep at his farm used to slaughter them as spring lambs for reasons of flavour as Swedes tend to dislike the taste of mutton. It’s actually very difficult to find anything else than spring lamb. Personally I like them both, quite different meats and dishes. For mutton I tend to go heavy on garlic and lemon, though.

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          • We’ve baked some lamb legs that were so huge, we wondered how old the “lamb” was at slaughter. 🙂 The taste of those wasn’t noticeably stronger than usual, though.

            When I was at uni, the cafeteria had curried goat with rice, Caribbean style, as a regular menu item. It was delish. A ginger beer was the perfect accompaniment.

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              • Curry doesn’t agree with me nowadays, no matter how mild. And I can’t use anything hotter than a jalapeno now, which is super-gringo.

                I do know our favorite (ex-) Afghan restaurant used lamb that was bearing on mutton, because once a friend who knew anatomy of mammals ID’d a bone I fished out.

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      • Purest speculation here. The villagers may have had small plots of enclosed land for kitchen gardens or whatever. Assuming the farmers knew about crop rotation and manure as fertilizer, they could have kept a wether to knock the weeds down between plantings. Wethers aren’t as aggressive as rams, and some of them are good characters. I knew one who was named after a famous brand of lawn mower. The neighbors brought him their veggie peelings as a treat, and I swear the critter could hear the rattle of a plastic bag at a hundred paces. 🙂

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          • It was standard practice to castrate the lambs just before sexual maturity at about six months old, as the meat changes character afterward (both sheep and ram meat taste really bad and is quite stringy. It is still a practice in out the way places with poor transportation/distribution.

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            • As I child I was fed both lamb and mutton. Mutton had a different texture to lamb, but I didn’t find the taste objectionable.

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                • Tangentially, Cat Eldridge, also of this parish, writing over at File770, discusses the Asimov story ‘The Fourth Homonym’, which includes the following passage:

                  “ Geoffrey Avalon looked down austerely from his seventy-four-inch height and said, “More than you might think. Suppose you owned a castrated ram that was frisky on clear days and miserable on rainy days. If it were merely cloudy, however, you might wonder whether that ram would be frisky or miserable. That would be ‘whether wether weather.’ “”

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    • We were once in Sutherland (extreme northeastern Scotland), on a tour. Another of the couples was surnamed Sutherland (“no relation to Donald and Kiefer”), so had naturally been interested to visit there. As we stood shivering in the July weather, she said, “THIS was the Vikings fabulously warm southland?” and we agreed.

      Mind you, they were from Canada and Mr. LT and I grew up in the Rockies, so we knew cold.

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  7. I guess the U.S. equivalent of this is looking at which countries the local placenames are recycled from. My wife’s childhood home in Pennsylvania is a mix of English (Reading, York*, Lancaster*), German or German-adjacent (Manheim, Lititz, Strasburg), or the holy land (Lebanon, Ephrata), consistent with settlement by religious minorities from England and Germany/Switzerland. Sometimes, placenames fool you, though. We live in Durham, named after a Dr. Durham who sold land for a train station, not the cathedral city in England.

    *with appropriately colored roses as emblems, of course.

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    • Where I live, they’re English/Scottish, or Mexican Spanish, or the occasional famous-ish American from Northern/Western European stock. You can find something named after George Washington everywhere, though.

      Places all over often have Anglicized Native names, like the one that means “Big River”– which it is.

      I was extremely amused at the whining of friends from Da North Bronx when in LA and they couldn’t even say “Cahenga” and “Tujunga”, which are perfectly pronounceable Spanish versions of the local native names.

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      • If you meant Cahuenga, whether it’s pronounceable (once has been informed that ‘hu’ is pronounced ‘w’) depends on how it is divided into syllables – syllable initial eng+gee is not something English speakers in general are used to producing. Wikipedia doesn’t offer a pronunciation for Tujunga, but I guess j is pronounced as in Navajo and jojoba, but there’s the same issue of division into syllables.

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        • Yes, but I had pronounced both several times in sloow motion over a few days– and we were cutting between the valley and Hollywood regularly.

          And Tujunga is pronounced exactly like it’s spelled in Spanish “tu-hung-a”. They could say “Navajo” perfectly well.

          Ca-hu-eng-a similarly.

          How the Tongva said them, nobody now knows — even the remaining Tongva.

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          • I don’t see a difficulty, in Spanish it’s pronounced Ca-wen-ga, but of course everybody is different regarding languages. Some people’s brains short-circuit when they believe they have to pronounce a different language, no matter how easy it may sound.

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        • The /ŋ/ phoneme occurs often in the Polynesian languages. In syllable- and word-initial positions! Frequently it is spelled “g” and not, say, “n” or “ng.” Thus a surname like “Galuvao” might be /ŋaluvao/ in theory, but in practice it is uttered NULL-uh-vow.

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          • I think I’d do better with syllable initial /ŋ/ than /ŋg/ or /ŋk/, but I might be realising it as /nj/ or /ŋj/

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            • I suspect that English speakers mostly re-divide the syllables, as you mentioned earlier. The Samoan word “pālagi” /pālaŋi/ (whitefella, foreigner) might come out of the English-speaker’s mouth as CV CVC V instead of all syllables being CV. We’re so used to /ŋ/ in syllable-final position that it comes more easily that way.

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  8. WAY more interesting than around here. There are a couple of ersatz Classical towns (Rome and Athens, which looms out of the cow pastures like Oz). But mostly they are pedestrian names, distinguished only by “Duh!” or eccentric pronunciation. For every Tunnel Hill (Because next to a tunnel. Through a hill.), there is a Lafayette. No, you did not pronounce that correctly. Yes, it is French, the Marquis de Lafayette being an American revolution hero from France. But the accent is on the second syllable and you pronounce it “faye.” OK, the occasional Native American thing, notably Chickamauga and Rossville.

    I swear, it’s as dull as Varnell.

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