SR - Lions and Eagles and Boars, Oh My!

[Tim McDaniel]

I have Johnson's _Place Names of England and Wales_.  Not
the best source, but it has some useful info, and the Norse
had some influence on English naming (and wealth and
ancestry and ...).

Some of the more common Norse-based suffixes (or those
English ones with Norse cognates):

-bach, -beach, -beck: brook, stream.
-borne, -bourne, -burn: brunn-r; a spring, fountain, then a
    brook, a rivulet
-by, -bie: by-r, by; dwelling, village
-dale: dal-r; a dale (deep low place)
-fell: fiall, fjeld; a mountain, a hill, a wild stretch of
    waste hill land, a moorland ridge
-ford, -forth: ford, fjord
-gill: gil, geil; a deep glen.  "The _Oxford Dictionary_
    does not class this with 'fish gill' as is often done."
-hope, -op, -up: h{o'}p; a haven, place of refuge "but we
    have no seaboard names in England akin to S. Margaret's
    Hope, Orkney and Queensferry".  In Old English a piece
    of enclosed land, generally among fens and marshed,
    waste land.  Near the north border, a small enclosed
    valley branching off a larger one.
-how: haug-r; mound, cairn
-ing: ; "personal in its reference, not local.  The idea
    conveyed is one of possession, or intimate connection
    with ... [e.g.] {Ae}theling ... only thereafter 'place
    where these descendents dwelt" --  but it need not be a
    true patronymic
-thorpe, -torp, -trop: thorp, torp; farm, hamlet, village
-thwaite: pveit, pveiti; a piece of land, a paddock (lit. a
    piece cut off, a piece 'thwited' or whittled off)
-ton: t{u'}n; enclosure, homestead, farm, only later town
-with, -worth: vith-r; a wood

(Most of them are for small places.  This is unsurprising,
given that there are very many more small places than large
ones ...)

I would point out two things about these suffixes.

One: *please* beware of "false friends", spellings that look
like other things to modern eyes.  Hope, with, worth, fell,
fjord, beach, gill.  I'd prefer to avoid misleading names.

Two: with the possible exception of one meaning of "-hope"
(I'd like more data on that), every meaning is tangible.
Hill, creek, valley ... basically chunks of land of various
elevations and wateryness.

There may be examples of names with "heart", "courage", et
cetera -- I simply don't know.  I'd bet that something
tangible is in there too: dale, valley, -ton, -by, -ly, ...

Daniel "you like 'heartland'?  OK.  In Welsh, 'Calontir'"
de Lincolia
-- 
Tim McDaniel; Reply-To: tmcd at crl.com; if that fail, tmcd at austin.ibm.com
is work address.  tmcd at tmcd.austin.tx.us is wrong tool.  Never use this.
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