A Toponymist's Tour of the World

A few will be aware I have been known to speak on various subjects over the years. Fundamentally these all revolve around my favourite subject of etymology. Have always enjoyed bringing this fascinating subject to others. It’s not for me to say whether the audiences have, although many have asked me to return.

Thought it might be worthwhile sharing a snippet or two from these etymological presentations, continuing with Toponymists Tour of the World. In the classic story of Around the World in Eighty Days, Phileas Fogg bets four members of his Reform Club that he will return to that very establishment inside that set number of days. The wager meant winning or losing an immense £20,000. No such odds or amounts here but a tour of the world through the origins of some of the more famous names around the globe. There is also the chance to compare the meanings and derivations with place names found much closer to homes.

English is a Germanic language and the odd word of German is recognisable to we English but ostensibly it’s a foreign tongue to us. And so is the native language of Wales. Which is interesting because it’s a Celtic language but named from Old English, the forerunner of what we speak today. It is a name from the Old English language brought to our shores by the Saxons (and before anyone points out the Angles, Jutes or Frisians also came across, they all spoke the same language as much as we English, Scots, Welsh, Irish do with different dialect words.) It is from the Old English wahl – which is often defined as ‘foreigner’ but correctly should be said to be ‘not Saxon’, which may be the same thing but looked at from a slightly different angle.

Speaking of close neighbours, we should also mention Scotland. This is simply ‘the territory of the Scots’, although ‘Scot’ is a Latin name for the Gaels. Note until the Middle Ages the place was seen as divided between the Scotland and Alba.

Austria – this is German for ‘eastern realm’.

Herzegovina – this is ‘herzog’s land’, this being the German word for a ‘duke’.

Greece – comes from the people, the Greeks. The Greeks never referred to themselves as such, the city states and regional people all knew themselves by different names: Spartans, Athenians, Ionians, and all the rest. The Greeks latterly referred to themselves as Hellene, named after Hellen their mythological patriarch. It was the Romans who called them Graeci when they found an offshoot of these people living happily in Southern Italy. Trouble is, nobody knows what Graeci signified – was it an insult?

Italy – is generally accepted to be ‘the land of young cattle’, not an insult but the use of the bull to symbolist the resident tribes, the people being the children of the bull .

If you think you know someone who would like to hear me speak on this subject, drop me a line.