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Name studies have been around for a long time. In Ancient Greece, philosophers like Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle saw names as central to the understanding of language, providing key insights into human communication and thought. Still, to the present day, questions such as Are names nouns? and Do names have meaning? are still hotly debated by scholars within both linguistics and name studies.

The post Is name studies a discipline in its own right? appeared first on OUPblog.

Standing underneath the monstrous Soviet statue of “Motherland Calls” looking out over the mighty Volga River, I could understand why the city should have been renamed, rather unimaginatively, Volgograd “City on the Volga”. Between 1925 and 1961 it had been called Stalingrad, and was site of one of the most ferocious battles in the Second World War. By 1925, Josef Stalin was the Communist Party General Secretary, and the trend to rename cities and towns in his honor had begun. Since he had been chairman of the local military committee which had organized the defense of the city in 1919 against the White Russian armies, why not name this city after him? But in the years following his death in 1953, Stalin began to fall from grace and many places named after him were renamed. So what was Stalingrad called before 1925? Tsaritsyn. Something to do with the Tsar, probably, and given this name when it was founded as a fortress in 1589. This is a tempting assumption, but it is an assumption too far; toponymy is prone to such traps. Tsaritsyn is actually a Tatar name meaning “Town on the (River) Tsaritsa” from the Turkic sary su, “Yellow River.” It was given this name because of the golden sands of the Tsaritsa, at the point where it flows into the Volga.

So rivers have played a part in two of Volgograd’s names. Rivers attracted people because they provided fish to eat and water to drink, and facilitated movement and communication. People needed to differentiate between their settlements so they began to give them names: “river” (Rijeka in Croatia), “river mouth” (Dartmouth in England), “fast-flowing” (Bystrytsya in Ukraine and Bystrzyca in Poland), “white water” (Aksu in China, Kazakhstan, and Turkey), the “yellow river” (China).

In due course, something more creative was needed, and somebody trying to curry favor suggested naming their settlement after its leader. Leaders, at all levels, liked this idea and it spread rapidly. It helped to be royal (Victoria appears at least 31 times in 19 different countries), be a person of great power or influence (Washington), someone who had achieved some conspicuous feat (Gagarin, the Soviet cosmonaut), or explored new territory (Columbus). During the age of colonialism, some senior administrators and generals achieved comparative immortality by having places named or renamed after them, notably in the British Empire (Abbottābād).

Russian and Soviet leaders were keen to project power or to intimidate. So in 1783, Count Paul Potemkin built a fortress at Vladikavkaz, which he called Vladet’ Kavkazom (“To have command of the Caucasus”). The name is now taken to mean “Ruler of the Caucasus”. In the same way, Vladivostok, also founded as a military post, has the name “Ruler of the East”. Founded in 1818 by the Russians to spread fear amongst the Chechens, Groznyy, capital of Chechnya, was given the name “Awesome” or “Menacing”. As recently as 2008 Vladimir Putin, the present Russian president, conferred the name “Peak of Russian Counter-Intelligence Agents” on a previously unnamed peak in the Caucasus Mountains.

There is no shortage of saints’ or religious leaders’ names throughout the world, particularly in California, Central and South America, and the Caribbean as a result of the earlier Spanish and Portuguese presence. Some may have been founded or sighted on a saint’s feast day (St. Helena), because they were the personal saint of the founder (St. Petersburg in Russia). or because the saint was thought to have been martyred there (St. Albans in England).

Possibly the three most important elements of toponymy are languages — living and dead — history, and geography. Numerous modern names in Europe are derived from their Latin names, since they were within the Roman Empire, and some of these Latin names had Celtic origins (Catterick and Toledo). Many names appear to have barely changed over the centuries (Lincoln and Civitavecchia) and thus their meaning can be deduced with little difficulty. Others, however, might appear to have an obvious meaning, but in tracing their history, it may be found that the origin or present meaning is not as anticipated (New York). It is sometimes the case that the original and modern forms are almost identical, but the meaning of a word has changed. The modern “field” is taken to mean an “enclosed piece of land” whereas the Old English feld meant “open land”. Place names are a window on the past. For example, Scandinavian names in England indicate where the Norwegian and Danish population was concentrated a millennium ago. Birkby, from Bretarby “Village of the Britons”, shows that this was a village inhabited by Britons rather than Anglo-Saxons.

The descriptive element of geography has a role: points of the compass (West Indies, East Anglia), the presence of ports, bridges, or fords (Oxford), the color or shape of a mountain (Rocky Mountains), even market day (Dushanbe “Monday” in Tajikistan).

Toponymy is a bit like astronomy — there is always something more to discover. There is probably no inhabited place on earth without a name. Yet the origin and meaning of some of the best known names are unknown. London is a case in point.

Some places like to draw attention to themselves by having unusual names: Halfway, Scratch Ankle, Truth or Consequences, Tombstone (all in the USA); or by having a name so long that virtually nobody can either remember it or pronounce it. Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch in Wales has 58 letters, and the Maori name of a hill on the North Island of New Zealand, Taumatawhakatangihangakōauauotamateauripūkakapikimaungahoronukupōkaiwhenuakitanatahu, has 84 letters, the world’s longest place name. Bangkok makes do with Bangkok, but a native of the city might give you its full name, all 60 words of it in English.

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Heading image: Monument in Volgograd – Motherland by alex1983. CC0 via Pixabay.

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From Garlick Hill to Pratt’s Bottom, London is full of weird and wonderful place names. We’ve just published the second edition of A.D. Mills’s A Dictionary of London Place Names, so I thought I would check out the roots of some of London’s most famous addresses.

Abbey Road (in St. John’s Wood): Developed in the early 19th century from an earlier track, and so named from the medieval priory at Kilburn to which it led. Chiefly famous of course as the name of the 1969 Beatles album recorded here at the EMI studios.

Baker Street: Recorded thus in 1794, named after the builder William Baker who laid out the street in the second half of the 18th century on land leased from the estate in Marylebone of Henry William Portman. Remarkably enough, Baker Street’s most famous resident (at No. 221B) was a purely fictional character, the detective Sherlock Holmes created by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle in 1887!

Buckingham Palace: The present palace stands on the site of Buckingham House 1708, so named after John Sheffield, Duke of Buckingham, who had it built in 1702 (on land partly leased from the Crown) and whose heir sold it to George III in 1762. This building was rebuilt and much enlarged in the 1820s and 1830s according to the designs of John Nash and Edward Blore, becoming Queen Victoria’s favourite town residence when she came to the throne in 1837. The site was earlier known as Mulbury Garden feild 1614, The Mulbury garden 1668, the walled garden having been planted with thousands of mulberry trees by James I who apparently had the grand idea of establishing a silk industry in London.

Canary Wharf: The grand commercial development with its massive 850ft tower (the highest building in the country), begun in 1987, takes its name from a modest fruit warehouse! Canary Wharf was the name given to a warehouse built in 1937 for the Canary Islands and Mediterranean fruit trade of a company called ‘Fruit Lines Ltd’. The name of the Spanish island of Canary (i.e. Gran Canaria, this giving its name to the whole group of ‘Canary Islands’) is of course also of interest: it is derived (through French and Spanish) from Latin Canaria insula, that is ‘isle of dogs’ (apparently with reference to the large dogs found here).

Drury Lane: Recorded thus in 1598, otherwise Drewrie Lane in 1607, named from Drurye house 1567, the home of one Richard Drewrye 1554. The surname itself is interesting; it derives from Middle English druerie ‘a love token or sweetheart’. The lane was earlier called Oldewiche Lane 1393, street called Aldewyche 1398, that is ‘lane or street to Aldewyche (‘the old trading settlement’).

Knightsbridge: Cnihtebricge c.1050, Knichtebrig 1235, Cnichtebrugge 13th century, Knyghtesbrugg 1364, that is ‘bridge of the young men or retainers,’ from Old English cniht (genitive case plural -a) and brycg. The bridge was where one of the old roads to the west crossed the Westbourne stream. The allusion may simply be to a place where cnihtas congregated: bridges and wells seem always to have been favourite gathering places of young people. However there is possibly a more specific reference to the important cnihtengild (‘guild of cnihtas‘) in 11th century London  and to the limits of its jurisdiction (certainly Knightsbridge was one of the limits of the commercial jurisdiction of the City in the 12th century).

Piccadilly: This strange-looking stre