Place Names Outside of Wales

Slofenia = Slovenija … (saesneg Slovenia) :slight_smile:

I bought a jigsaw puzzle map for kids, which was called y byd and all the countries were meant to be in Welsh, but half of them are actually spelt in English and that is confusing for a child who isn’t used to X’s for places like Mexico and China was spelt as in English and a child who hasn’t learnt English properly yet will obvioulsy see the Ch and pronounce in the Welsh way - so Tsiena is much better and more natural in my opinion. It’s not as if the Chinese spell their country as China is it. On the map I got - Greenland was called Gronland, rather than Ynys Las and it was too small for Wales to even be on it!

On another note - many of the English place names or historic European/middle Eastern names, haven’t necessarily been translated into Welsh - in many cases these are very old names and sometimes older than the English equivalents, so it is the English names which may be modifications of the original names of Prydain. I very much doubt that Edinburgh predates Caeredin or Cornwall predates Kernow. I don’t know if there is a Welsh place name for somewhere like Eccles, but no doubt it would have been closer to the Welsh Eglwys or Cornish Eglos initially - well it is pretty much the same pronounciation even now I suppose.

New places names like Efrog Newydd are generally exceptions, but Efrog for York is very old and quite often the English names in many places are not the ones used in the Countries themselves.

I was intrigued by Awstralia/Australia. This comes from Latin/Ancient Greek and no doubt about that, but the Awst is intriguing and you wonder is there a connection and maybe there is. The roman Cicero who coined the term some time BC also prolifically introduced many loan words into Latin from other languages and one of the most dominant of the languages at the time would have been Gaulish, so there may have been a Celtic inspiration to the Latin some time back or maybe some mutual use of similar words, although of course we will never know.

Anyway, plenty of food for thought, I suppose

I don’t know how old Ynys Wyth for Isle of White is, but worth seeing if the English name came first or second - often hard to tell and controversial.

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Well, I have learned something! I knew Brenhiniaeth, but not Teyrnas!

[quote=“Toffidil, post:22, topic:4815”]
Edinburgh predates Caeredin
[/quote] Y Gododdin would say Din Eiddin, I think.

[quote=“Toffidil, post:22, topic:4815”]
Efrog for York
[/quote] Eboracum was the Latin, which would predate Yorvik, the Viking, which led to York!

[quote=“Toffidil, post:22, topic:4815”]
Awstralia/Australia
[/quote]I don’t know who named this antipodean place!! Presuming Aust/Awst implied ‘outland’ it suggests a Dutch or German speaker?? Somebody told me Captain Cook found it. but Tasmania was named for a man called Tasman who was Dutch, so I guess he named Australia! He probably didn’t name Tasmania after himself but some of our Aussies may know!!
Ynys Wydd is interesting. Eight is used in English for a narrow bit of water and the Isle produces a narrow between it and “The North Island”, so that implies Wight derives from Wyth!!!

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Nope. It’s very old and very Latin.

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Diolch yn fawr!! It is amazing there are not a lot of places called varients of “Here be Dragons”!! :grinning:

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And apparently ebor is linked with brythonic words like the welsh efwr, for alder-buckthorn (breton evor) and the og just being a typical ending for a place. The latin acum ending is something they tacked on as a place name ending like the og in Welsh.

I did look up Australia and it was some English or Scottish governor of the territory apparently (well whatever it said on Wikipedia), but the word Australes has been around from Ancient Greek for a hypothesised southern territory for a long time and Awster has even been used in welsh for south in the middle ages. So Australia was definately named by someone who knew their ancient Greek or Latin. Awst the month in Welsh is always etymologised back to Augustus, as in August. I think these things have pinged about so much you can’t easily say what came from what. I just thought it was interesting because we haven’t just stuck a W in as a modern way of changing the spellings etc - it is actually a very natural time honoured practice to change the spellings in these sorts of ways.

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And following on from your point, I suppose this is relevant as well: channel or estuary perhaps? (makes you wonder where the English eight you mentioned for a narrow bit of water comes from - haven’t heard that one?)

gŵyth = faen; ffrwd, cornant, ffos, (geir.) cwter, carthffos; sianel; braich o fôr yn ymestyn i’r tir, aber: vein, sinew, nerve; vein, seam (in min.); stream, brook, ditch, (dict.) gutter, drain; channel; firth, estuary

Also in Cornish Gwyth means trees and lots of houses called things like Chy an Gwyth etc in Cornwall

Wikipedia does suggest celtic associations for the island as its possible root, but also says no-one really knows - actually a very long and important celtic past to this little place - changed hands several time. Wheat was traded/used here 8000 years ago - you could also pull carts across the solent at low tide at this time.

I suspect that there may have been words spawned in this area - associated with trade over a long period time, from the mesolithic, through the iron-age to the Romans, that have filtered into a lot of different languages.

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That’s the traditional spelling, which didn’t distinguish between voiced and voiceless “th” (the sounds represented by th and dd in Welsh) - I believe it’s a voiced sound at the end so the newer spellings have a -dh at the end of the word: gwydh, gwedh. (And a single tree is gwedhen or gwydhen.)

I wonder whether it’s related to Welsh coed; the closer relative is, I’d always thought, the Cornish koos, koes, coos “wood, forest”, which matches the sounds better but which is a normal singular noun in Cornish (plural koesow, kosow, cosow) rather than a collective noun.

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I don’t know about coed - but Gwydd was also widely used in Welsh for Wood and all things Coed related until the 19th century and maybe later or still is? - These brythonic languages are so similar really aren’t they.

gwŷdd : Pren(nau), coed(en), cangau, brigau; fforest, coedwig, llwyn(i); yn ffig. llinach, tras,
tree(s), branches, twigs; forest, woods, shrub(s); fig. lineage, genealogical tree, stock.

Maybe the Isle of white was the isle of trees, but I suppose it has the wrong dd/dh - not far away though?

Just checked A D Mills “Place-names of the Isle of Wight”.

[With a bit of paraphrasing…] The name of the Island itself is extremely ancient. It is recorded as Vectis in Ptolemy’s Geography (150AD), then as Vecta in the 4th-century Antonine Itinerary, as Wiht in Bede (9th-10th centuries). In Domesday it appears as Wit or With and in the 12th-13th centuries as Wiht, With, Wicht, Wict, Wight, Wycht, Whyht, Whyt, Wythe and Wyght. The name is certainly Celtic, possibly from an old British word connected with gwaith (‘turn, course’), and its meaning may be ‘place of the division’, with reference to the situation of the Island ebtween the two arms of the Solent.

So the name has its origins in the Iron Age (or earlier, depending on how you like your chronologies for Celtic languages).

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This one has got legs I think. This does link to the name I think, but the most interesting thing is the find of cerea grains, 8’'800 yr old on the island. All cereal crops linked to wheat came from a mountainside in Turkey at least 9500 yrs ago. The find in the IOW predates any find in Europe by 100s of years. How did they get there - would hunter gatherers have marched thousands of miles with seeds without planting them on their way - and what would hunter gatherers being doing with seeds anyway Was the solent a perfect wetland river estuary for migrating birds?.

How does this link to the language - well the Germanic Anglo Saxon evolution of the words wheat and white is different to the Celtic one to gwenith and Gwen, but did they share a common root, that diverged ie a bon PIE route. Would be great if true, because you could gain an insight into history by exploring the evolution of words in different languages.

I’m not speculating just throwing ideas in the air to be shot down in flames.

The first definite cereal grains found in the UK are around 4000 BC, by which time farming had been "normal on the shores of continental Europe for a good long while. Pollen from cereal grasses (wheat, barley etc) have been identified in UK (inc. Welsh) peat cores for a thousand years or so before that but not everyone is convinced because it’s very hard to tell the difference between pollen from a cereal grass and an “ordinary” grass (cereal pollen is larger, but it overlaps in size range with other pollen). The Bouldnor Clay wheat on the IoW is earlier than all of this, but the identification is on the basis of DNA which is a pretty revolutionary way of doing things. I haven’t read the original Nature report, but I think this is one of the first times this has been done. It’s possible therefore that the technique is being misinterpreted, or that more DNA work from other sites will confirm the findings, but at the moment it’s an outlier to the expected pattern. My own inclination is to keep an eye on the findings but to treat them with caution for now - radical discoveries are as often wrong as right, and time is the best judge.

If you have an interest in such things there’s an excellent book covering the origins of farming in Wales by some chap called Steve Burrow, also available in Cymraeg (shameless plug over :smile:)

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Who translated it into Welsh @steve_2?

Interested in all things like this - hard not be and a nice hobby on the side;

I suppose one swallow doesn’t make a summer as you said so will watch with interest new discoveries, which now seem to be gathering apace

Found this link to Celtic terminology for all things IOW, from a humanities student at the University of Iceland! - not sure of its accuracy but some interesting things in it.

I’ve always liked this area, becasue if you follow the avon up from nearby Christchurch you pass by lots of the ancient favourites like woodhenge and stonehenge etc

http://skemman.is/stream/get/1946/20651/47457/1/James_Rayner_BA_Thesis_Skemman.is_Feb_2015_$00283$0029.pdf

@steve_2 has his theories about Stonehenge as well, which he can articulate in Welsh.

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The Dutch and then the Portuguese etc found it a long time before the English came here. Tasmania was originally ‘van Diemens Land’ and the mainland was New(Nieuw) Holland. The First English name I know of was New South Wales, for the land around Sydney. It wasn’t until much later that a governor of the time organised the name change to Australia. Especially around the north and west coasts there are still lots of Dutch names e.g. Cape Leeuwin. And along the coast of South Australia at least lots of French originating names.

As a side note, I would suspect New Zealand would refer to Zeeland in the Netherlands.

Oh I could go on and on.

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Oh, multiple grovels!! It was a senior moment!! The word is straight and I haven’t a clue why ‘eight’ popped into my head instead! Well, I saw ‘wyth’, so I know why I thought 8, just not why I confused it with ‘straight’!!! :confounded:

Terra Australis, I believe?

And Tasmania would stem from Abel Tasman. A Dutch explorer, also see Tasman Sea between Australia and New Zealand.

History of Wight: when the people of the young man buried in Paviland Cave were obliged, by advancing ice, to move south, we cannot know what language they spoke. Neither can we know whether the folk who moved north as the ice retreated were of that stock or quite different. However, what became the Isle of Wight must have been a hilly area with good views looking at the plains around it. I’d expect it to attract folk as a place to live and maybe it was actually settled first?
At that stage, I’d be surprised if it was tree covered because the ice didn’t let trees grow!

Dyfed Elis-Gruffydd was the translator. Maybe by the time I finish my next one I’ll be in a fit state to be able to translate it myself :wink:

Them were the days! I think my spoken Welsh has shrunk a long way from then, but comfortingly my reading Welsh is now pretty passable.