#placenames

Map of one letter-places in Europe

Tumblr, I present to you — a lake in Finland that directly translates to "Eye Of The Ass Lake"

It's about a murder committed in a forest... :->

Source: https://twitter.com/SnaGaeilge/status/1616467128294449152?s=20&t=UJ8TT5l0A_wj6xA3VguJaA

For more details go to Witold Doroszewski (Rozmowy o języku, v.3, 1952) or Eugeniusz Pawłowski (Sącz i Naszacowice. Pochodzenie i dzieje nazw Nowego i Starego Sącza oraz nazw z nimi związanych, Rocznik Sądecki, v.8, 1967; Nazwy miejscowe Sądeczyzny, 1965). Also Jan Miodek addressed this problem here. (All sources in Polish.)

In a modern world, where everything seems both intimately interconnected and dreadfully distant, what use remains for place names? Certainly, in a small community with a shared mythos -- an understanding of common stories and where they occurred -- evoking the name of some certain place would hold distinct associations. But today? I struggle to see the value -- or at least I did. Funnily enough, I found another perspective in the wisdom of the Apache, right here in my home state of Arizona. They, far more than most of us today, retain an intimate awareness of the importance of place in telling a good story. So crucial is the place and its name in their stories, that , as cultural anthropologist and linguistic researcher Keith Basso puts it, "placeless stories simply do not get told." That idea, that of the placeless story, got me thinking about the stories I hear most often today, stories my friends in different states relay to me and laugh uproariously, while I sit on my phone, desperately trying to keep up. I think that nowadays, we have largely lost an awareness of how important place is to a story, because we can no longer rely on our audience having the same shared understanding of context and place. That is not to say the practice is lost in the modern world, though. As I said, the value of place names helps inform our storytelling today more than we realize, only in a form adapted to our modern context. Instead of specific locales like one hilltop or tree, such that the Apache might evoke, we instead situate stories with different levels of specificity depending on our audience. If I am talking to a friend who lives down the street, I might refer to local landmarks by name, which evokes a very specific, targeted feeling (a "vibe," if you will). This sense of vibe can be extended to a far broader context if I discuss recent events with friends out of state, where I might refer to my context as simply, "y'know, Arizona," which evokes a less specific, but still very useful foundation. So while placenames might not be as useful to us today as they were and still are to the Apache, "the landscape in which people dwell can be said to dwell in them." And if Mr. Basso's verbiage is a little over-the-top, let's keep it simple (if a little Shakespearean): vibes maketh man.

The most common type of placename in Wales, as any visitor to the country quickly notices, begins with the word llan, and usually has the name of a saint suffixed. Llan means “church” or “ecclesiastical enclosure,” and so the place-name Llanddewi, for example, means “the church of Dewi” (St. David). A notable feature of these place-names is that certain ones are repeated in what appear to be significant patterns of distribution. As we have already seen, after the rise of the Second Dynasty of Gwynedd in the middle of the ninth century, certain kings exercised a wide hegemony. The political circumstances appear to have been favorable for the propagation of patterns of the “llan + saint” type of place-name. So, the distribution of the place-name Llanddewi coincides with the overkingdom of Deheubarth; Rhodri Mawr’s hegemony across Powys and Ceredigion similarly provides a context in which the toponym Llanbadarn (Llan + Padarn) could have come to spread out of Ceredigion and into the southerly part of Powys. If the llan was the ecclesiastical center of the great estate, or maenor (see below), then we might therefore suppose that the suffix of a dynastic saint was often either an indication of direct royal control, or ecclesiastical proprietorship by the relevant episcopal church. A similar kind of process appears to have been at work in Cornwall too, where names in lan originally referred to a sacred ecclesiastical enclosure, but were later extended to designate the estate on which the church was situated.