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Updated: June 27, 2025
Most of the place-names of India are native names given by natives, for centuries before France and England began to struggle for its possession in the eighteenth century India had passed through a long and varied history. When we remember that the natives of India have no name to describe the whole continent, it helps us to understand that India is in no way a single country.
As in Britain and France, this folk has left its indelible mark upon the countryside in a wealth of place-names embodying its characteristic titles for flood, village, and hill.
Get a map of that country, and note all the place-names beginning with Llan, and you will see. There are countless thousands of them. 'Llan' means 'the holy place of, and the rest of the name will be that of the saint who taught or preached there: of whom, I believe, only David appears in the Catholic calendar. They were most of them active in the fifth and sixth centuries.
With the discovery of the New World and the colonization of the Dark Continent and other far-off lands, a great many new names were invented. We could almost write a history of North or South America from an explanation of their place-names. In learning the geography of South America we notice the beautiful Spanish names of most of the places.
The place-names of India given by natives of the many different races which have lived in the land could fill a book with their stories alone. We can only mention a few. The name of the great range of mountains which runs across the north of the continent, the Himalayas, means in Sanskrit, the oldest language used in India, the "home of snow."
Sometimes, but not often, the new colonies were given the names of their founders. William Penn, who founded the Quaker colony of Pennsylvania, gave it this name in honour of his father, Admiral Penn. Sylvania means "land of woods," and comes from the Latin sylvanus, or "woody." But it is not only in America that the place-names tell us the stories of heroism and romance.
I confessed at home the story of my weakness; and so it comes about that I owed a certain journey, and the reader owes the present paper, to a cat in the London Road. It is of the coast I speak: the interior may be the garden of Eden. History broods over that part of the world like the easterly haar. Even on the map, its long row of Gaelic place-names bear testimony to an old and settled race.
I make no doubt that philologists can explain Sminthian Apollo, the Dog-Apollo, and all the rest in the same way, and account for all the other peculiarities of place-names, myths, works of art, local badges, and so forth.
The South Island colonists mispronounce their beautiful Maori place-names murderously. Even in the North Island the average bushman will speak of the pukatea tree as "bucketeer," and not to call the poro-poro shrub "bull-a-bull" would be considered affectation. There is or was in the archives of the Taranaki Farmers' Club a patriotic song which rises to the notable lines
The non-Aryan, "Asianic," group of languages, to which certainly Lycian and probably Karian belong, has been shown by the German philologer Kretschmer to have spread over Greece into Italy in the period before the Aryan Greeks entered Hellas, and to have left undoubted traces of its presence in Greek place-names and in the Greek language itself.
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