[NR] NORTHERN REGIONAL NAMING POLL

[Jennifer Smith]

Honest I'm not trying to pick on our most excellent Cassius, but now
that I am a bit more coherent after a good night's sleep...

On Mon, Jun 27, 2011 at 11:14 PM, Cameron Lewis <okrabbit at cox.net> wrote:
> [...] If you have
> any information from heraldic type folks on why any of these names would not
> pass now is the time for them to be taken off the list. [...]

With all due respect, this is not how registration of a name works.
It's the other way around: is there any information (documentation) on
why any of these names WOULD pass?

So, with that in mind, here's a few suggestions.

Libraries are wonderful places, but don't always have a lot of
resources for the type of thing we're trying to do. University
libraries are much better, but not as many of us have easy access to
those. Google Books, however, may occasionally also be useful. Given
all that, here are some suggestions of sources to find and look in for
possible names (either the ones already suggested, or new ones):

Bahlow, Hans. Deutschland Geographiche Namenwelt. (German placenames)
Dauzat, Albert and Rostaing, Charles. Dictionnaire Etymologique des
Noms de Lieux de la France. (French placenames)
Ekwall, Eilert. The Concise Oxford Dictionary of English Place-names.
Johnston, James R. Place-Names of Scotland.
Mills, A. D. A Dictionary of English Place-Names.
Room, Adrian. A Dictionary of Irish Place-Names.
Smith, A.H. English Place Name Elements.
Watts, Victor, ed. Cambridge Dictionary of English Place-Names, Based
on the Collections of the English Place-Name Society.

There's a great many web articles at
"http://s-gabriel.org/names/nonhuman.shtml", all very suitable for our
purposes.

And then in Google Books itself, you can search on "place-names",
ignore more placenames for American states and whatnot, and then find
some promising things. For example, there's a preview version of
Mills' "Dictionary of English Place-Names" in google books
(http://books.google.com/books?id=br8xcW1f_a8C), and just for fun I
searched for 'horse', and found the following:

Aughrim (Eachroim) 'horse ridge'
Aughris Head (Ceann Eachrois) 'horse promontory'
Knocknagree (Cnoc na Grai) 'hill of the horse stud'
Follifoot: Pholifet 12th cent '(place of) the horse fighting' alluding
to a Viking sport
Garron Point (Gearran) 'horse point'

....and many others. Most of them I didn't really like the sound of.
:)  One I did particularly like was:

Markinch: Marchinke 1055, Markynchs c.1290, 'horse meadow' (from
Gaelic marc + innis)

But even better was the one above that:

Markham: Marcham 1086, Estmarcham 1192. 'homestead or village on a
boundary' (from Old English mearc + ham)

What might even be easier, for those less inclined to look in a book,
is to articulate the *meaning* of a name you'd like to see. For
example, "something with 'horse'", or "something with 'red'", or
plains, or the like. That at least gives us a search term to use when
looking for possibilities.  In that one book, I searched for
'thunder', 'storm', 'noise', 'noisy', 'wind', and few others, and
found....nothing. Those just weren't concepts used when naming places
in England. They may be in another area, sure, but there? No, not in
Old English, Anglo-Saxon, Gaelic, etc.

The simpler, the better.

-Emma