Hallo conlangers!

On Wednesday 18 January 2012 09:27:45 R A Brown wrote:

> On 17/01/2012 22:11, Padraic Brown wrote:
> > --- On Tue, 1/17/12, R A Brown wrote:
> [snip]
> 
> >> The name is derived from Old English _Leodridan_<--
> >> leode (people) + rida- (ride) = place where people can
> >> ride through the river; and indeed it was a place where
> >> there was a ford across River Mole.
> > 
> > I guess the ancients thought "Moleford" didn't have a
> > sufficiently dignified ring to it!
> 
> But whether the river was called by any such name back then
> is a matter of controversy.
> 
> The usual explanation is that "Mole" (a tributary of the
> Thames) is a back formation from Molesey, the name of a town
> on the Thames near where the Mole flows into the Thames.
> The name means "Mul's island" or "Mul's meadow" - and as for
> the proper name "Mul" that's anyone's guess  ;)
> 
> But some hold that the name is derived from Latin _mola_
> "mill" because of the watermills that once existed along it;
> others say it is named after the little borrowing critter,
> because some of the flow diverts under the North Downs at
> Box Hill through 'Swallow Holes', i.e. the river 'burrows
> underground' to reappear again.
> 
> Personally I thing the latter two explanations are fanciful
> and the back-formation from Molesey the most likely - as
> does also Oxford English Dictionary of Place Names    :)

What this and many other examples show is that you have to
work from the oldest known forms of the names, and cannot
trust the "obvious" meanings of them.  But you must not
take recourse to languages that were never spoken in the
relevant area!  This is something which some people tend
to forget, such as Theo Vennemann who sees "Vasconic"
(i.e., a hypothetical ancient language family of which
Basque is the last survivor) everywhere in central and
western Europe; many of his etymologies are bogus on the
Basque side, being based on ghost words or on words also
found in Romance languages where he reverses the generally
accepted direction of borrowing (i.e., these words are
Romance loanwords in Basque, not "Vasconic" loanwords in
Romance).  And on the side of the names discussed, Vennemann
also makes some egregious mistakes, such as discarding the
oldest known forms in favour of younger forms which happen
to fit his hypothesis better, assuming that cities are usually
older than villages and thus more likely to bear "Vasconic"
names (in fact, cities are often *younger* than the
surrounding villages) or contriving "Vasconic" etymologies for
such (seemingly) transparent names as _Ebersberg_ or
_Bischofsheim_ (of course, such names may be products of
folk etymology).

The problem, of course, is that we do not know the original
meanings of the names.  There are few exceptions, where a
particular element correlates with a salient feature of the
places named thus.  An example are several central European
place names containing the element */hal/, all of which
denote (often former) salt production sites.  This element
has hence been conjectured to mean 'salt' - but in which
language?  Celtic has been proposed; but the shift of
initial */s/ to /h/ is attested only in Brythonic.  Greek
has been seriously proposed, but it has never been spoken
in central Europe!  Some scholars have given up and now
derive it from PIE *ḱel- 'slope' whose o-grade indeed gives
*hal- in Germanic (e.g., in German _Halde_ 'heap') - but
why then does it correlate so closely with salt production?
It seems that we have the word for 'salt' in an unknown
substratum language here, and the similarity to PIE *sh2al-
may indicate that the language in question was related to
Indo-European.

> >> Some Celtic names may, of course, themselves have been
> >> recast by folk etymology to give meaning to an earlier
> >> pre-IE name    :)
> > 
> > Enter Old Albic! ;)
> 
> Exactly what I thought when I wrote that    :)

Of course ;)  But I am very aware that Old Albic is merely a
fictional portrait of what such a pre-IE language of Britain
may have looked like.  We know almost nothing about the
languages spoken in pre-Celtic Britain.  What we can guess is
that perhaps:

1. The languages had VSO word order.

2. The languages had phonologies conducive to the development
   of initial consonant mutations.

3. The languages left traces not only in geographical names,
   but also in the lexicon of the Insular Celtic languages.

4. The languages were related to other substratum languages on
   the continent (on evidence of the British Isles taking part
   in the "Old European Hydronymy").

5. The languages were more distantly related to Indo-European,
   branching off from the latter before the rise of ablaut
   (from seeming sound correspondences between "Old European"
   river names and IE roots that have meanings which seem
   reasonable for river names).

All of these points are, however, uncertain, with the uncertainty
increasing down the list.  With Old Albic, I assume that all five
points are true; but in fact, all of them could be false!

When doing both research on prehistoric languages and invention
of fictional prehistoric languages, you must never forget which
hat you are wearing at the moment, and restrict the flow of
information from the former to the latter - otherwise you are
doing a crackpot job!

> [...]
> 
> On 17/01/2012 23:18, [log in to unmask] wrote:
> > R A Brown wrote:
> >> Yep. The problem in the US is compounded further by
> >> the mere multiplication of source languages -- English
> >> names, French, Spanish, a whole host of Native names,
> >> Dutch names, probably some Russian and German ones
> >> too. (And, at least I believe, Nativ"names" "It's a
> >> Bloody River You Stupid White Git" or "Don't These
> >> Metal Men Have Mountains Where They Come From?")
> 
> No - I never wrote that!!
> 
> But I have no doubt it's true - the same sort of thing
> applies in many other parts of the world.  When i was at
> school i the 1950s there was lake in Africa called 'Nyasa'
> and a country called 'Nyasaland' - both are known as Malawi
> now. I recall being told that 'nyasa' simply meant "lake" in
> the local language and wasn't a name at all, just a common noun.
> 
> Much the same had on in this island centuries ago; we now
> have at least two rivers called 'Avon' which is only an
> Anglicization of Welsh _afon_ "river".

A famous example of a misunderstanding is _Yucatán_, which is
said to come from an expression of 'I don't understand' in an
indigenous language (which a Spanish explorer got as a reply
when asking a native, in Spanish, for the name of the country).
I don't know, though, whether this story is true.

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