Henry Bradley

“ Now I hope to show some reason for believing that by the use of proper methods, the origin of our place-names may often be determined with a high degree of probability, and even with positive certainty. That the matter is not of the highest importance may be freely admitted; but as false local etymology has in the past been the source of a great deal of historical error, so sound local etymology may sometimes be a valuable help in the discovery of historical truth. ”

“ Inasmuch as the Romans in Britain must often have found it necessary to erect towns or military stations in places that were uninhabited and had not native names, we might have expected to find that they often gave Latin names to these new foundations. As a matter of fact, names of Latin etymology are almost entirely absent from the lists of towns and stations given in Roman military documents. What the Romans usually did, when they had to find a name for a station in a place that had no native appellation, was to take the British name of the adjacent river, and use it as a place-name. ”

“ M. D'Arbois de Jubainville has conjectured that Londinion, properly the neuter of an adjective, means 'the place belonging to a man named Londinos', and that this personal name is derived from londos, a word that survives in Irish as lonn, savage, wild. This guess seems to be the only one hitherto offered that has the merit of being philologically possible. The meaning given to the assumed personal name is not inconceivable, when we remember that in early times such words as 'bear' and 'wolf' were continually used in the formation of names of men and even of women. ”

“ At any rate, if the subject is worth studying at all, it is worth studying with an honest desire to arrive at the truth, even though the truth should turn out, as it sometimes will, to be disappointingly commonplace. ”

“ Some Old English names which are compounds of two words still in common use are nevertheless unintelligible in their modern form, because the changes that have taken place in English pronunciation have operated differently in the compound and in the simple words. When a word is part of a compound (especially of a proper name, where the literal meaning is of no practical importance) , it is spoken more quickly than when it stands alone, and therefore the vowels are shortened. The Old English ác survives as 'oak', and the Old English tūn as town ”

“ On the other hand, names like London, Kent, Thames, Helvellyn—in fact, the vast majority of the names on the map—are, to persons not specially instructed, mere arbitrary sequences of sounds, which might just as fitly have been applied to any other places or natural objects as to those which they actually serve to identify. At the same time, no intelligent person can doubt that even these names cannot have been given without some reason, and that if we had only sufficient knowledge we should find them just as significant as those which need no interpretation. ”

“ It has therefore fallen into the hands of unqualified persons, for many of whom it seems to have an unaccountable attraction. Their usual procedure is to ransack the dictionaries of Anglo-Saxon, Danish, Welsh, and other languages, and if they can find words in any of these which bear some resemblance to the syllables of the name to be explained, and which, when joined together without the slightest regard to grammatical rules, can be made to yield something like a plausible sense, they imagine that they have solved the problem of its etymology. ”

“ The names left us by the Danes and Norsemen are of great historical importance, because it is from their evidence, aided by that of local dialects, that we can determine what parts of the country were most abundantly settled by those peoples. The ending -by, as in Derby, Whitby, is always the mark of a place once inhabited by Scandinavians; and so is the ending thwaite, which is the Old Norse thveit, a paddock. The word thorp, a village, was Old English as well as Scandinavian; but the Norsemen made more frequent use of it than did the English. ”

“ It is only a reason for waiting patiently for further light.
London is almost the only instance [6] in which a British name of a town has remained nearly unaltered for nineteen hundred years. As a rule, when the Angles and Saxons adopted the name of an inhabited place, they appended to it a descriptive word in their own language, such as ceaster (borrowed from the Latin castrum) , a fortified city, burh, borough, or wīc, a dwelling-place. Thus Wenta became Wintanceaster, now contracted to Winchester. If the British name was a long one, it lost some of its syllables ”

“ Another point of difference between Old English dialects is that in the north the ending -es of the genitive had, at least as early as the tenth century, come to be often extended from the masculine and neuter nouns to those of the feminine gender. Hence, while the word gāt, she-goat, had in the south gāte as its genitive form, the modern name of the place called by Bæda Ad Caprae Caput is Gateshead. ”

“ The vocabulary, then, which has to be used for the interpretation of the British place-names of the Roman period, is not that of modern or even of early Welsh, but is a vocabulary reconstructed by means of a comparative study of the Celtic languages. It would, of course, be absurd to suppose that the whole of the language of early Britain can be recovered by the inferential methods that I have described. In all probability the ancient language contained many words that have been lost both in Welsh and Irish ”

“ Although Dovercourt looks like a modern name containing the word 'court', it is found in records of the tenth century, and is a British compound meaning 'little water'. And Winfrith, in Dorset, is in Domesday Book written Wenfrode, which shows that it is identical with the common Welsh name Gwenffrwd, 'white brook.'
But it is not always the case, when a town or village has a name similar to that of the river on which it stands, that the name of the town is derived from that of the river. For our map-makers have had an evil trick of inventing names for small streams which they found nameless ”

“ Much light on the prehistoric forms of Welsh words is afforded by comparison with the closely related Irish language, in which the nouns and adjectives often retain more distinct traces of the primitive declensions than the corresponding words in Welsh. ”

“ An etymologist who can operate at will with the words of half a dozen languages, and has no inconvenient grammatical knowledge to hamper him in putting them together, is able to make a name mean almost anything he likes ”

“ With very few exceptions, the scholars who have possessed the philological knowledge requisite for the scientific treatment of the subject have been so conscious of its difficulties that they have preferred to leave it alone. ”

“ It is in the patronymic function that this suffix is chiefly found in English local nomenclature. Sometimes it stands as the ending of a place-name: Godalming, for instance, was the abode of the Godhelmingas or children of Godhelm. More frequently we find a patronymic, formed with this suffix, in the genitive plural, followed by some such word as hām, home, tūn, town (meaning a single farm) , as in Buccingahām, Buckingham, which probably means the abode of the descendants of Bucca. ”

“ In Gaul most of the place-names ending in -ācon (latinized -ācum, in modern French -ay or ac- according to the local dialect) are known to be derived from persons; and that affords some reason for preferring the personal derivation in this instance.
By the time of the Angle conquest, the British language had changed a good deal, and Eburācon had come to be pronounced Evurōc. In accordance with their usual practice the Angles dropped the last syllable and added their word wīc, so that the name became Eoforwīc (the f being pronounced as v) . ”

“ As the British language changed, the name came to be pronounced Luitcoit. In early Welsh writers Cair Luitcoit (cair, now caer, meaning fortress) is mentioned as an ancient city. When the Angles conquered the country, they seem to have left the old fortified town uninhabited (as they often did) , and made their own settlement in the 'Luitcoit-field'—that is to say, in the tract of country adjacent to the old Lētocēton. The alteration of Luitcoit into Lyccid is not very great. A name of similar origin, by the way, is Chesterfield ”

“ The dative plural of all nouns ended in -um, which has sometimes been corrupted into -ham or -holm, but sometimes remains in other forms, as in Moorsome from Mōrhūsum, 'at the moorhouses.' Hallam, from which is derived Hallamshire, the name of the district including Sheffield, is probably æt Healum, from the dative plural of healh, haugh. When the first element of a compound is an adjective, it usually appears in the dative of what is called the weak declension. ”