Wait until you learn a second language and start learning town names in a new country. Here we have such amazing town names like “The Eyebrow” and “Camp”.
(I just chose the silliest ones I know, there are normal town names too)
A lot of place names in English speaking countries are just names of natural or man-made features, but the etymology isn’t obvious. Like Portsmouth or Waterford are pretty understandable, but -don, -den, -ton (valley, hill, farm) are all just things.
The Eyebrow’s pretty cool though. Japan’s also got some good ones, like Thousand Leaves, Oak (just oak), or (loosely translated) Noodle Hill. They like numbers too, like Eight Door or Lake Twelve. There’s even a Silent Hill, but it’s not too silent these days with almost 700,000 people there.
Noodle Hill.
Ah, yes, Ramenfuji!
Reminds me of this 😁
There’s a city in Ukraine named, literally, “The Curved Horn” (Кривий Ріг)
That’s a pretty cool name
Yeah, towns where i live are literally translated to boytown and lame crap like that
Try “settlement”
Germany has Katzenhirn - cat brain.
I like this more than toponyms ending with -pol, -tsk, -nsk, -rsk, and to a lesser extent -iv. It sounds unique and original, not following a template, and somehow fantasy-books-like as it suggests what people probably did there.
On the other hand, Ukraine has it’s own New York too, just like in OP, and it inspired a lot of memes.
The people that named those places were still European
Checkmate
Not around here. We named towns after terms from native tribes who were kicked out of the area.
That sounds offensive
It’s fine. Ayn Rand said it’s OK because they’re not real people or something.
And Chicago was named with a native word that describes a local onion or something
Also after wildlife we killed and nature we destroyed to build it.
Michigan?
Wisconsin, but it applies to a lot of the Midwest and Plains and… Kinda everywhere in the US.
Could be a lot of places. Washington is full of them, too.
Those European names: the word “Hill” in 3 different languages mashed together
Tom Scott had some more info on that
Most names are essentially just landmarks of some sort.
Hamburg is derived from Hammer Burg, simply meaning hammer castle.
Part of Hamburg is Altona, which is lower German for all too near, because it’s really close to Hamburg.
East of Hamburg is Lübeck, which is means “settlement of the lub”, whoever the lub were.
Even farther east is Warnemünde, which is located at the mouth (Mund) of the river Warnow.
Said river is getting pretty wide a bit upstream, which gave the city of Rostock its name (“where the river gets wider”).
East of that: Stralsund. It’s the sound (the water kind) of Strela.
And so on and so on.
most of the city names in Washington State are native in origin. Just an FYI
I feel like Puyallup had to have been named by a drunken southerner
You’re telling me there is no Walla Walla, England?
Americans didn’t name these places. There were no Americans when these places were named
Nah we definitely have had places like this named by Americans, too
Yep, just Americans look over to New Zeland nobody else for sure
Or Australia. If it isn’t something from europe, or a indigenous name, it’s something really imaginative, like Northern Territory, Western Australia, and South Australia
There’s a small town in Missouri I visited named Versailles and its pronounced ver-sails.
They just named it after the place they were from and put “new” in the front.
New Niu York
Aggravates the shit out of me. I was reading about some famous person, and it said he’s from Bayonne. And I thought, no shit, he’s from Jersey?
No, not that Bayonne, and not that Jersey either.
Jesus fuck why couldn’t people have made up new names, or just used more of the native names that already existed?
I see Camden in the news, and go through many emotions figuring out which one!
Bayonne, SW France ?
Ixonia, Wisconsin solved that problem by just drawing random letters from a hat until they came up with something pronounceable: Ixonia.
But I’m always amused by the street Oxford Place near my house. It’s a street named after a university, named after a city, named after a shallow spot where cattle could cross the river.
In Iowa, we have a Madrid, but its pronounced like MADrid. And a town named Nevada, but pronounced NeVAYda.
Cairo in Illinois, pronounced KAY-row.
Around Rochester NY theres a Chili but they pronounce it Chai-lie.
There’s a Brisbane in California, pronounced like “Briz-bain” (the Aussie pronunciation is more like “Briz-bn”)
In Alaska there’s a town called Chicken. They wanted to name it after the Ptarmigan that were abundant in the area, but couldn’t agree on the correct spelling.
But if it’s a French place, they’ll pronounce it wrong.
Fortier pronounced “Forty-er” as in “my fort is more fort-like(fort-y) than your fort”.
There’s no right way to pronounce french
Wulle wu kuschee awek mwa?
I grew up near Calais, Barre, and Charlotte, and none of them are pronounced how you’d think.
Ohio: Versailles (locally pronounced vur-sales)
Utah: Monticello (Italian, but locally pronounced “monta sell-oh”)
Indiana pronounces their Monticello the same way
They pronounce it like its French but it turns out to be Spanish
How do you think we pronounce DeQuindre? Dee-kin-der. How about Livernois? Just add an e at the end and you’ll figure it out. Too our credit we somehow pronounce Cadeiux correctly.
New Penistone
