hi everyone.
Thanks Keith and Andrew for comments on my Nov post on Buckingham.
If Buckingham is a -ham and not a -hamm, then so much the better for my point - and then this PN is a pure elephant name (the PN does not refer or appear to refer to the overwhelmingly significant landscape feature).
I no longer need to posit that for later OE speakers the OE equiv of MLG bukken was no longer meaning-transparent & that a tautological -hamm was added to an earlier OE PN like *bukk or *bukking.
There is a new big French PN book out - available on Amazon UK at abt GBP 35.00 inc p&p.
Roger Brunet - "Tresor du Terroir - les NL de la France"- CNRS Editions Paris
(CNRS = equiv. maybe of Inst. Advanced Research, Princeton NJ i.e. reputable)
RB is a geographer rather than a linguist. A major starting point as he says himself is the IGN series of 1:25,000 maps.
So he's starting from French PNs major and minor as they are now.
He admits that he isn't terribly interested in spending a lot of time distinguishing between Celtic/Romance and Germanic cognates, for example
(e.g. PNs "-burg", which can come from Gaulish as well as Frankish and, as a borrowed element, from Ofr)
So one might say "big picture", a geog. approach (he's a P. Joycean) rather than a historical one
Very good if you are interested in recurrent French minor names (e.g. it was news to me that the name-type Chemin des Dames - as in the WW1 site at Verdun - refers to fairies).
I was fascinated to see that on p. 264 and p. 482 "eye" names ("Oueil, oueilh et meme Oeil") are discussed referring to springs and river sources.
THe ref. on p. 482 is in the chapter "pieges (traps) et enigmes de la toponymie".
RB hedges his bets by wondering if these French "eye" names are not reinterpreted /akwa/ names.
I think not - because (see my earlier aquae SULis post), we can now sketch a pretty much contigous zone where Eye met. = Spring, Source.
- South and Mid Wales but not North W (see EANC index "llygad").
I've just bought Bruce Copplestone- (sorry) PN Heref . (excellent) - and I notice many ex. of OW "llygad" (my spelling) for "source, spring" in the LL boundary clauses he quotes.
- maybe Bath SOM (Aq. SULis if this is an eye name. Don't see why not).
- SW France
- Spain, apparently as a calque of Arabic (though it could be from the pre-714 Romance of Spain as in neighbouring Gascony). RB is good on Basque names, but doesn't mention Basque w.r.t. this discussion.
- the Arab language area
Thank you for reading this post.
nick
|