From the department of flawed-but-fun

[tree_and_leaf]

Come a set of maps (orignally German, I think) which translate placenames into modern English. You can quibble with some of their translations (surely Edinburgh is Edwin's Fort, not Slopecastle?), but they have a strange and poetic - or sometimes plain weird - beauty of their own. Am oddly tempted to acquire one...

Comments

[helflaed.livejournal.com]

There is something beautiful about them. Incidentally, I live in High Hedge.

[tree_and_leaf]

It's hardly scholarly, but it's still rather brilliant in its own right....

[parrot-knight.livejournal.com]

What might Eidyn mean, if Din Eidyn indeed pre-dates the rule of Edwin of Northumbria?

[schreibergasse.livejournal.com]

Is Din Eidyn actually an attested version ofthe name? I'd sort of assumed that the name was a Porthaven, [something] din burgh...

[parrot-knight.livejournal.com]

I can't find immediately whether Din Eidyn is a hypothetical Brythonic name or not, but it could be.

[tree_and_leaf]

You pair are out of my league on this one.... ;)

[(Anonymous)]

It is fun, but not enough to spend money over. For instance, it is by no means clear that LONDON means HILLFORT - at least, the Hillfort bit is only the second half. Likewise, Wales is in my view not "Land of the foreigners" but "Land of the Romans"; from one end of the Teutonic world to the other, the cognates of "Welsh" stand for "Roman, Romance, Rumanian, Italian". {E.G. Walloons = French speakers, Waelsche = Italians, Wallachia, Wallachs, Vlachs; and the Polish loan word Wlochy for Italy.) And I would be curious to see whether Rome is named City of Strength (gk Rhome) or City of the River (Etruscan Rumon). Not to mention the umpteen names whose original meaning literally nobody knows.

[tree_and_leaf]

As far as Old High or Middle HIgh German goes, I do have a sense of 'waelsch' being used for 'foreign, a bit weird' (I don't know enough about the other cognates to comment on them).

There are a number of problems with the concept, as you say, but as long as you don't think it's scholarship, it's fun (though I admit that I find arguing with these things half the pleasure!)

From PK at work

[(Anonymous)]

ISTR someone suggesting that 'waelsch' and its cognates might have had a derogatory slant - 'people still stupid enough to think that the Roman Empire was a good idea and is coming back'.

Re: From PK at work

[tree_and_leaf]

Heh - yes, it often is a bit derogatory. ISTR that Welsh nationalists occasionally get cross about being stuck with the name that the heathen Saxons inflicted on them, when they were the invaders in the first place...