You have to love the s/weird/unusual [1] names of places in the UK (and it looks like a beautiful area from the small picture): > Tintern, in the Wye Valley, Monmouthshire There's also plenty of "upon the"s and "x-in-y" (ie: Henly-in-Arden). Not just the England but seems just as common in Scotland, or even more common. I can imagine the early computer systems of the postal organization having to deal with these quir…
Tintern 'secret' medieval tunnel system found by accident
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Re: Tintern 'secret' medieval tunnel system found by accident
#102You have to love the s/weird/unusual [1] names of places in the UK (and it looks like a beautiful area from the small picture): > Tintern, in the Wye Valley, Monmouthshire There's also plenty of "upon the"s and "x-in-y" (ie: Henly-in-Arden). Not just the England but seems just as common in Scotland, or even more common. I can imagine the early computer systems of the postal organization having to deal with these quir…
Tintern is a beautiful place, and Tintern Abbey is particularly so - plus it has an amazingly rich history. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tintern_Abbey Edited to add - Nice set of photos at the bottom of this page: https://medievalheritage.eu/en/main-page/heritage/wales/tint...
Also wonderful Wordsworth poem
, perhaps his best.
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45527/lines-composed-...
Re: Tintern 'secret' medieval tunnel system found by accident
#103You have to love the s/weird/unusual [1] names of places in the UK (and it looks like a beautiful area from the small picture): > Tintern, in the Wye Valley, Monmouthshire There's also plenty of "upon the"s and "x-in-y" (ie: Henly-in-Arden). Not just the England but seems just as common in Scotland, or even more common. I can imagine the early computer systems of the postal organization having to deal with these quir…
Understanding common place name elements helps a lot with reconstructing the history of places in the UK. As per [0], -ham, -ing, -ton, are old English, -by, -thorpe and others are Norse/Vikings. We've also had hundreds of years for the original names to change in spelling and pronunciation. Especially the French-derived ones.
I have to say that one of the small joys of doing geography A-level in England was finding the silly names on the detailed Ordnance Survey maps. There was always one or two that enlivened the dullest lessons on geomorphology, road networks, etc. I still find a lot of humour in these placenames. Exhibit A: Piddletrenthide [1] is one close to me, quite close to Tolpuddle. It's my belief from local knowledge that Piddletrenthide is pronounced with two hard 't's, i.e. Piddle - Trent - Hide. Perhaps if there are HN'ers from Piddletrenthide here, they can correct me.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toponymy_of_England#English
[1] https://www.visit-dorset.com/explore/piddletrenthide-and-pid...
Re: Tintern 'secret' medieval tunnel system found by accident
#104Earlier quoted context omitted.
Never thought I’d see my part of the world on here; used to drive through Weston under Lizard every day. Some good place names in Shropshire, too, but Durham has my favourite with No Place and Pity Me.
Don’t forget Quaking Houses and Unthank!
I always thought Quebec was an odd name for a village located in County Durham. Pretty sure there's a California near Crook, too. Muggleswick near Consett is a good one.
And then over in Northumberland there's Once Brewed, Twice Brewed, Snodgrass.
Re: Tintern 'secret' medieval tunnel system found by accident
#105Earlier quoted context omitted.
> There's also plenty of "upon the"s and "x-in-y" (ie: Henly-in-Arden). These are common in many languages. Even in England: Weston-super-Mare is just latin for "Weston by (literally "over") the sea". And constructs like "Stratford-upon-Avon" (to disambiguate from other Stratfords) are pretty common in most places; consider " Frankfurt am Main " and " Frankfurt an der Oder " all of which specify that their town is th…
One example in Bernese Oberland I like: There's a ski resort Lenk. People say they live «in the Lenk» or they travel «to the Lenk». In German you have to know that the genus of «Lenk» is femimine and use the dative or the accusative: «in der Lenk» or «zur Lenk». That's very weird but even to me omitting the article and preposition sounds wrong. By the way «to the» is contracted from the long for «zu der» to «zur». Co…
Typically the origin of such toponyms is in abbreviation of a designator (as happened for example with den Haag, where the full name is still survives in official documents), rather than proper noun, where the abbreviation becomes a proper noun.
In English this rarely survives except for odd cases such as The City of London (which is a small, legally distinct entity from what most people refer to as London). English is happy to drop articles when they don't reduce ambiguity, hence countries (Austria, Scotland, but retained in the descriptive name The United States of America) or Bend, Oregon (a case similar to Lenk).
Re: Tintern 'secret' medieval tunnel system found by accident
#106Earlier quoted context omitted.
> There's also plenty of "upon the"s and "x-in-y" (ie: Henly-in-Arden). These are common in many languages. Even in England: Weston-super-Mare is just latin for "Weston by (literally "over") the sea". And constructs like "Stratford-upon-Avon" (to disambiguate from other Stratfords) are pretty common in most places; consider " Frankfurt am Main " and " Frankfurt an der Oder " all of which specify that their town is th…
There's Manchester-by-the-Sea, MA. There's also a lot of "New" versions of older European locations as a way to distinguish them from other similarly named places when there aren't any rivers nearby, I guess, like New Jersey. Don't forget, a lot of places in the US were also already named before European settlers arrived. It might also simply not be needed as a matter of practicality. There are many Springfields, but…
The "New" towns in the US make some sense in that they mean "Our" town of that name. Here in the UK we have towns like Newcastle where the newness has lost its novelty after a 1000 years.
Re: Tintern 'secret' medieval tunnel system found by accident
#107Earlier quoted context omitted.
> These are common in many languages. Yup. There are plenty of them in Italy, we don't use dashes but there are various towns with generic prefixes and suffixes. Reggio Emilia and Reggio Calabria were just "regium", Latin for region or town, and at some point they gained the extra name (which refers to the wider area) to differentiate them. Near my hometown we have Casalecchio di Reno, which means "bunch of houses ov…
Reggio Calabria Italian name comes from the Greek name Rhegion. It was founded by Greek colonists pretty much at the same time as the foundation of Rome. Reggio Emilia name comes from the Latin regium.
Under Roman rule, Reggio Calabria was Regium too. And its original foundation is actually likely to pre-date the Greeks...
Re: Tintern 'secret' medieval tunnel system found by accident
#108Earlier quoted context omitted.
Reggio Calabria Italian name comes from the Greek name Rhegion. It was founded by Greek colonists pretty much at the same time as the foundation of Rome. Reggio Emilia name comes from the Latin regium.
Under Roman rule, Reggio Calabria was Regium too. And its original foundation is actually likely to pre-date the Greeks...
I never denied it, I just explained that the origin of the name is completely different and it was translated in Latin from the ancient Greek name.
Re: Tintern 'secret' medieval tunnel system found by accident
#109Earlier quoted context omitted.
Which Middle English was heavily influenced by. Middle English was closer to French than modern English in many ways-English monarchs still spent time in Normandy and claimed the French crown for generations after William the Conqueror.
Can you provide some citations for locative prepositions appearing before their nouns? I am not widely read in classical Chinese, but all the examples I've turned up have used the normal order. e.g. 孟子 1A/3 河內凶，則移其民於河東，移其粟於河內 (strongly suggesting that the current naming practices were also current 2200 years ago); 庄子 秋水 13 我知之濠上也 (ordinary positioning).
You're totally right, I was confusing modifiers with Chinese's general looseness towards word class, a tendency even more pronounced in Classical Chinese [1]. That means what looks like modifier/preposition could be functioning as a verb instead.
So my mother-in-law just said '上海不在海上', i.e. 海上 is closer to the literal meaning of 'on top of the ocean (physically)', which the city is not.
Perhaps 上 here acts as a verb or gerund ((going up / on the way) to the ocean)? 下海 means 'going (down) to the ocean'.
The rabbit hole here can get deep (and thanks for drawing me in!), this book [2] goes in-depth about how word class and word order influenced one another as Chinese developed.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classical_Chinese_grammar#Word...
[2] https://www.google.com/books/edition/_/r9WO6g5mqi8C?hl=en&gb...
Re: Tintern 'secret' medieval tunnel system found by accident
#110Earlier quoted context omitted.
Can you provide some citations for locative prepositions appearing before their nouns? I am not widely read in classical Chinese, but all the examples I've turned up have used the normal order. e.g. 孟子 1A/3 河內凶，則移其民於河東，移其粟於河內 (strongly suggesting that the current naming practices were also current 2200 years ago); 庄子 秋水 13 我知之濠上也 (ordinary positioning).
You're totally right, I was confusing modifiers with Chinese's general looseness towards word class, a tendency even more pronounced in Classical Chinese [1]. That means what looks like modifier/preposition could be functioning as a verb instead. So my mother-in-law just said '上海不在海上', i.e. 海上 is closer to the literal meaning of 'on top of the ocean (physically)', which the city is not. Perhaps 上 here acts as a verb…
> Perhaps 上 here acts as a verb or gerund ((going up / on the way) to the ocean)? 下海 means 'going (down) to the ocean'.
This is possible, but I don't think it's a coincidence that the normal way to express that is 下海. The ocean is pretty much by definition both "down"stream and downhill of everything; approaching the ocean by going up is semantically unnatural. My guess above of "get onto the ocean" (i.e. "set sail") was drawing a parallel to 上路 "get on the road" / "start traveling".
> 海上 is closer to the literal meaning of 'on top of the ocean (physically)', which the city is not.
I don't see this as a huge obstacle; "upon the sea" has the same literal meaning but isn't surprising in an English place name, though "by the sea", with the correct literal meaning, isn't surprising either.