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Updated: June 27, 2025
The ghosts of the old chiefs must surely chuckle when they note that the name by which Canada has called her capital and the centre of her political life, Ottawa, is an Indian name which signifies 'buying and selling. And the wanderer in this land will always be remarking an unexplained fragrance about the place-names, as from some flower which has withered, and which he does not know.
We lunched at Sybaris; that is to say, at the railway station now so called, though till recently it bore the humbler name of Buffaloria. The Italians are doing their best to revive the classical place-names, where they have been lost, and occasionally the incautious traveller is much misled.
The features and place-names in the Spanish chart will reveal some of the most important of Torres' discoveries at the south-east end of New Guinea, where the Spanish navigator made his first stay in order to refresh the crews of the Almiranta and Brigantine.
The region where English place-names abound is, of course, the Lothians; but scarcely an English place-name is definitely known to have existed, even in the Lothians, before the Norman Conquest, and, even in the Lothians, the English tongue never affected the names of rivers and mountains.
At Worms, the Siegfried story was pictured, in ancient times, in the Town Hall and on the Mint. All round Worms, place-names connected with the Nibelung tale occur with remarkable frequency. If the lost rhapsodic songs could be recovered, both mythological and historical allusions would, in all likelihood, be found in them.
The name came to be shortened into the one word dinde, and then, as people thought this must mean the female turkey, they made a new word for the male, dindon. But though so many words come from the names of places, and some of these would not seem to do so at first sight, there are other words which seem to come from place-names which do not do so at all.
Whatever else the southern mountaineer may be, he is original. Elsewhere throughout America we have place-names imported from the Old World as thick as weeds; but the pioneers of the southern hills either forgot that there was an Old World or they disdained to borrow from it. Often a surname is put to such use, as Jake's Creek, Old Nell Knob, and Big Jonathan Run.
Side by side with the total absence of all tangible relics may be set the fact that, whereas numerous place-names in the main island of Japan have been identified as Ainu words, none has been traced to any alien tongue such as might be associated with earlier inhabitants.
Let me cite one classic example of the latter. In 1898 a well-known Slovak editor was sentenced to eight months' imprisonment for two articles severely criticising the Magyarisation of place-names in Hungary.
So complex is the idea of even the simplest Town even in such a rustic germ as the "farm-town" of modern Scottish parlance, the ton of place-names without number. The varying development of the Folk into social classes or castes night next be traced, and the influence and interaction of all the various factors of Place, Work, and Family tabulated.
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