Re: The Glorantha Digest V7 #242

From: aelarsen_at_facstaff.wisc.edu
Date: Tue, 21 Dec 1999 11:09:43 -0600


>From: Joerg Baumgartner <joe_at_toppoint.de>

>Definitely. I don't know the British term for Eburacum, but the
>Anglo-Saxons called the place Eoforvic, the Danes Jorvik, and today the
>city around Manhattan is named New Eburacum. Local names can change over
>time, and the "vic" in the Germanic names of York would correspond to a
>Malkioni "-ket" which may have come with the Waertagi and their
>passengers.

        Well, the British didn't call it anything before the Romans arrived, because it didn't exist before the Romans arrived. Whether they called it by the Roman name Eburacum after it was founded or more likely transliterated it in their form of Celtic during the Roman period is unknown. After the end of the Roman period, they called it Cair Ebruoc, which is probably close to what they called it during the Roman period.

        Nova Sogsket to Nochet is improbable because it would involve contracting two words into one, which doesn't happen too often (although Norlans to New Orleans is an example of this). Usually, when a city has a two word name one word disappears and the other dominates. This happened with most Roman cities in Britain and Gaul. For example, Lutitia Parisiorum became Paris and Colonia Agrippa became Cologne.

        We'd have to accept that the dialect spoken in the region of Nova Sogsket was a slow, lazy drawl like Deep Southern English, which tends to blur words together, or that Nova Sogsket was considered too much trouble to keep distinct. Thus, in my state, the town of Fort Atkinson occasionally gets shorted to Fraxton by locals, but not by anyone else. The problem here is that when the name is written by the educated, it's written out properly.

        In order for either of these procedures to enable a permanent transition, there has to be a period when literacy disappears long enough for the oral form of the name to predominate. As far as I am aware, there isn't such a period in the Holy Country's history, but I could be wrong here.

Andrew E. Larsen


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