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Putting
American English on the Map
(from "About Language”
by William H. Roberts )
W.F. Bolton
What happens when "a whole new nation …
composed of literally millions of places – states, counties, cities and towns,
rivers, mountains, even swamps - … [awaits] new names from its new inhabitants”?
W.F. Bolton, a writer and philologist at Rutgers University, answers this question with
wit and scholarship, concluding that place names are a major in defining the
linguistic character of our nation. For Bolton,
toponymics, the study of place names, is essential to a grasp of American
English.
▀ JOURNAL PROMPT The history of a place or region can be
revealed by its place names. What do the place names in your neighborhood,
room, or region reveal about its history?
1. American
English came of age in the nineteenth century when it accomplished the naming
of places and naming of persons. For while the name for a native American plant
or animal may be distinctive, it is usually no more so than its referent, and
often rather less. The change of meaning for an ancient English word such as robin, for example, adds nothing to the
resources of the vocabulary, although it does adjust them a trifle. Even the
outright borrowing of a word like boss
from a foreign language is only a minuscule addition. Most important of all,
such adjustment or addition takes place unsystematically and anonymously.
2. But when a whole new nation, and a
huge one at that, is composed of literally millions of places – states,
counties, cities and towns, rivers, mountains, even swamps – all awaiting new
names from its new inhabitants, then the consequence, whatever else it is, will
be equally huge importance in defining the linguistic character of the nation.
So the study of toponymics – placenames – is essential to a grasp of American
English.
3. When, furthermore, the nation’s new
inhabitants arrive in their millions from hundreds of other nations, and become
parents in their new country to hundreds of millions more new inhabitants, then
the patterns of personal name giving that they develop here are hundreds of
millions of times more significant than designation of an unfamiliar bird as robin. So, the study of onomastics –
personal names – like the study of toponymics assumes an importance to be
measured by nothing less than the nation into which America grew during the nineteenth
century.
Names of Places
4.
Twenty-seven of the fifty United
States – over half – have names of native
American origin. Eleven of the others have names that come from personal names;
five are named after other places; five are from common words in Spanish or
French; and two are from common words in English. These five categories (native
words, personal names, other placenames, common words in other European
languages, and common words in English) account for most other American
placenames as well, although not always in the same proportions.
5. The state names based on native
words range from Alabama
and Alaska
to Wisconsin
and Wyoming. They include the names of tribes
(Arkansas, Dakota), descriptions (Mississippi,
"big river”; Alaska,
"mainland”), and words of long-lost
meaning (Hawaii, Idaho). Many of them are now very far from
the form they had in the native language, some seen to be simply a mistake. The
native Mescousing or Mesconsing, of uncertain meaning, was
written Ouisconsing by French who
first heard it, and Wisconsin by
the English. One map had the French form misspelled as Ouariconsint and broke the word before the last syllable, so a
reader who did not notice the sint on
the line below would take the name – here of the river – to be Ouaricon. At length, that became Oregon.
The Spanish heard the Papago word Arizonac
(little spring) as Arizona;
Spanish and American alike now think it is from the Spanish for "arid zone”.
6. The confusion is not surprising. The
native Americans themselves often did not know what the placenames meant
because the names had been around since time out of memory, perhaps given by a
tribe that had long ago disappeared, taking its language and leaving the names.
Many placenames were invented on the spot for the benefit of curious white
settlers where the native Americans lacked a name; that was especially true of
large features in the landscape like mountains. When a Choctaw chief was asked
the name of his territory, he replied with the word for "red people” – Oklahoma.
The names were transcribed in so many different forms that it is usually sheer
accident, and often unhelpful, that one has survived as the "official” form
rather than another, Delaware Susquehanna
(a tribal name) became something quite indecipherable in Huron, from which the French
got their version Andastoei; the
English made this Conestoga (ultimate
source of the name Conestoga wagon)
and used the word to name a branch of the Susquehanna River, a toponymic
variant of the "I’m my own grandpa” song. And careful study of native American
languages did not begin until long after many of these names had become settled
– indeed until many of the native speakers too had become settled in six feet
of earth and were beyond unraveling the placename mysteries they had left
behind. Maybe that is just as well, at least for delicate readers; native
Americans had a vocabulary rich in abusive terms, and they were not above using
them as a joke when a white inquired the name of a local river or neighboring
tribe.
7. All that is true of state names from
native source is also true of other such placenames. Chicago
appears to mean "the place of strong smells”, but exactly which strong smells is not clear. Mohawk is familiar name, but its derivation – apparently from the
Iroquois for "bear” – is obscured by its early spellings in no fewer than 142
different forms, the most authentic seeming to be something like mahaqua. A single expedition might bring
back many new names – the Frenchmen Joliet and Marquette, for example, brought
back Wisconsin, Peoria, Des Moines, Missouri,
Osage, Omaha, Kansas,
Iowa, Wabash, and Arkansas.
The story of Des Moines is typical. The Frenchmen found
a tribe, the Moingouena, who lived on a river. It was the explorers who named
the river Rivière des Moinguoenas and later shortened it to Revière des Moings.
Now moines is "monks” in French, so
by folk etymology des Moings, which
is nothing in particular, became des Moines,
which is at least something. But the French pronunciation /de mwan/ is far from
what an American makes of the spelling Des Moines, and
so we have /də moin/. It is a long way from the Moingouena tribe – too long for
us to trace by the normal process of historical reconstruction back through
Americanization, folk etymology, shortening, and the European transfer of a
tribal name to a river, if we did not have the documents to help us. In most
other cases, we do not have the documents, and the native names speak in a lost
language.
8. Many of the earlier native placenames
became disused among the descendants of the settlers who adopted them: Powhatan’s River became the James, the Agiochook Mountains
became the White
Mountains. Fashion in these matters followed the fashion in
the native Americans’ prestige, some whites thinking them fine in an exotic and
primitive way, others scorning them as crude and even barbaric. Frontier people
were often among the latter, people in the settled regions among the former;
but of course the frontier turned into the settled region, which sometimes
brought about a return to a native name or the imposition of a new one. In New
England, Agawam
became Ipswich (after the English
town), and later Agawam again. The names settlers chose
were not always tribally appropriate; unlike the frontier people, settlers were
insensitive to the differences among tribes about whom they knew next to
nothing anyway, so that – for example – the name of a Florida
chief would be given to some seventeen places, many of them far from his Florida habitat.
9. The vogue for native American
placenames was supported by literary models like Longfellow’s Hiawatha. But the native names did not
always meet the demands of American literary taste or English poetic forms, and
when they clashed it was the placenames that were reworked. As a result, the
"beauty” of such names is sometimes in the pen of the poet and not on the lip
of the native speaker. The same is true of translations: Minnesota
is approximately "muddy river”, but muddy
could also be "cloudy”, and skies are "cloudy” too. Clouds pass, skies remain,
and what have you? Minnesota
translated as "the sky-blue water.” The nineteenth-century American fad for
native placenames falsified the native American words in both form and meaning,
and often imposed a native name where none had been before. Ironically, the
travestied native name is often more recent than the English or other European
placenames it replaced.
10. Native American names in their least
native American form appear not only in places like Indian Bottom, Indian
Greek, Indian Harbor, Indian Head, Indian Lake, Indian Peak, Indian River, but
also Cherokee River, Cherokee Strip, Chippewa River (two), Chippewa Village,
Chippewa County (three), Chippewa Falls, and Chippewa Lake.
Placenames from Personal Names
and Other Words
11. The states named after persons stretch
from Pennsylvania (after William Pen, the
English Quaker who founded it) in the east to Washington (after George Washington) in the
west. Three were named after one royal couple: Charles I named the two Carolinas after himself (Latin Carolus means Charles), and Maryland
after his wife, Queen Henrietta Maria. Queen Elizabeth I named Virginia both after herself (the virgin queen) and after
the New World (the virgin land); West
Virginia followed naturally. Other royal names remain
in Georgia (King George II of England)
and Louisiana (King Louis XIV of France). The
governor, Lord de la Warr,
supplied the name for Delaware. Just
as Arizona
seems to stem from the Spanish for "arid zone,” so California
seems to represent the Spanish for "hot oven”. It figures. It figures, but it
is wrong. When Cortés came to the place around 1530, he thought he had found a
legendary land entirely peopled by women – his soldiers must have loved that –
teeming in gold and jewels and ruled by the fabled Queen Calafia. He named it,
accordingly, California,
and California,
accordingly, is a state named after a person.
12. The Americanization of placenames
involves not only folk etymology, translation, and loan translation, but the
distinctive rendition of words pronounced quite differently elsewhere. To
English ears our pronunciation of Birmingham (Alabama)
may or may not contain a giveaway /r/, depending on the regional dialect of the
American who says it. If he is from the place itself, the /r/ will probably be
absent, as it is in England.
But almost any American will make the last syllable much more distinct than
would an English resident of Birmingham (England), where
the last three letters get no more than a syllabic [m]. This tendency is also
observable in the local pronunciation of a place like Norwich (NJ),
approximately "nor witch”; in England
the place of the same name rhymes with "porridge”. The tendency is not always
present in common nouns, however; for example, the noun record is pronounced with two distinct syllables in Britain but not in America. The careful
spelling-pronunciation seems to be a consistent Americanism only when it comes
to placenames.
13. If the placename is not an English one,
American pronunciation will vary even more. We have already seen that many
native American placenames changed beyond all recognition in the white
settlers’ vocal apparatus. The same is often true of names from European
languages other than English. Los Angeles is
a notorious case – the common pronunciation contains several sounds not in
Spanish, and the first word is liable to sound like las in Americanized form. But no matter, the city was not, in any
case, named after the angels, but after the mother of Christ, "The Queen of the
Angels.”
Other Placenames
14. The five states that are named after
other places show, in four of them, the origins of their settlers: New Mexico by Spanish explorers coming
northward from "Old” Mexico; New Hampshire,
New Jersey, and New York by Britons who remembered an English country, an island in
the English Channel, and a northern English city, respectively. But Rhode Island is
named after the Mediterranean island
of Rhodes, where the
famous Colossus once bestrode the entrance to the port, a statue of a man so
huge that it gives us our adjective colossal
today. Why the smallest state should struggle under a name associated with the
largest statue is, all the same, a colossal mystery.
15. Spanish words for common things remain
in the state names Montana (mountainous), Colorado ([colored] red), Nevada
(snowed on), Florida (flowered, because it had many flowers, and because it was
discovered a few days after Easter, called "the Easter of flowers” in Spanish),
and – in an unorthodox form – the French Vermont (green mountain). English
common words remain in Maine (great or important, as in mainland or main sea,
from which comes the billowing main or
the Spanish main); and in Indiana,
from the Indiana Company that was formed by land speculators to settle the
Indian Territory.
16. All these patterns, like the pattern of
naming with native American words, are repeated in the patterns of naming
places other than states. Washington
names not only a state but, at one count, 32 counties; 121 cities, towns, and
villages; 257 townships; 18 lakes and streams; 7 mountains; and no end of
streets. Many saints’ names appear in Spanish, French, and English placenames.
With suitable suffixes on secular names we get Pittsburgh, Jacksonville,
and many more. Common things remain in Oil
City and in Carbondale,
as well as in the rather less common Canadian Moose Jaw and Medicine
Hat. Placenames are transferred from abroad – the
English Boston supplied the name for
the well-known city in Massachusetts and eighteen more Bostons and New Bostons –
or from the east of the United States, reproducing Princetons (fifteen municipalities and, in Colorado, a peak) and Philadelphias across the American
landscape with no more than a zip code of difference among them.
17. So what is true of the state names is
true of other placenames. But the other placenames have a few features that,
probably fortunately, never got put on the map in letters quite so large as
those employed for states. Some of these are European words from languages
other than the staple of Spanish, French, and English. Some are names from
classical or biblical lore. Some describe the place or its animals or plants.
And some seem to be inspired by nothing more serious than verbal playfulness,
nothing more reverent than onomastic cussedness. Placenames such as these,
especially the last category, have attracted the disproportionate attention of
many otherwise judicious investigators of American English, and they have
inspired poetic encomiums such as Stephen Vincent Benét’s "American Names”.
They are colorful, it is true, but you can scan the average gasoline company
map for hours before you will find anything more than the usual, usually
colorless, run of American placenames.
18. Dutch names are among the most important
following the native American, French, Spanish, and English. Like the others,
the Dutch had a way with native names, and their way gave us Hackensack
and Hoboken
(the latter from Hopoakanhacking) and
other names too. They named New World places after Old World places, like New Amsterdam and Haarlem; their Bruekelyn born anew on these shores
became Brooklyn.
They gave their personal names to places as well, so that Jonas Bronck
(actually a Dane in a Dutch settlement) gave his to the Bronx, and Jonkheer (squire) Donck gave his title to Yonkers.
And they gave the name of their language and culture to places like Dutch Neck (NJ). Many of the Dutch names
did not survive the occupation of their settlements by the English – Nieuw Amsterdam
became New York,
for example – and in this as in the other Dutch placenames, only the language
in question is different: the patterns of naming are the same as they were for
the languages that named thousands of other places.
19. A somewhat more novel trail of American
placenames is their reference to classical and biblical lore. Philadelphia may
"mean” City of Brotherly Love, in approximate translation from the Greek, but
it was probably named (by William Penn) after an Asian city of the same name, with
the additional warrant of the words of Saint Paul, "Be kindly affectionate one
to another with brotherly love.” Both the classical and the scriptural had
singular importance in a country that, unlike Britain, had millions of new
places awaiting names, places as often as not settled by those (again like
Penn) whose wandering had a religious impetus. When we today have a new
product, we may invent a neoclassical name for it: television is the most common example. But when we want such a
name, it is to the classical scholar that we turn. The early settlers likewise
turned to the schoolteacher or to the minister who was, frequently, the same
person. And they got just what they might have expected: in central New York there is a
Troy, a Utica, a Rome, an Ithaca, and a Syracuse.
(Troy was not the
first name the place had; under the Dutch it had been Vanderheyden or Vanderheyden’s
Ferry). State names like the Carolinas
and Virginia
took a Latin-like form, and when the Virginia
town near the Alexander plantation got its name, it was more than a happy
coincidence that it was called Alexandria
after the great city of the ancient world. The practice is most notable in the
east, but that has not stopped placenames father west like Cincinnati (Ohio),
Cairo
(Illinois), Tempe and Phoenix (Arizona),
and many others from achieving permanence.
20. The Bible too had an influence beyond
the Philadelphia
city limits. Mencken counted eleven Beulahs,
nine Canaans, eleven Jordans,
and twenty-one Sharons. The pattern is general: a preference
for the Old Testament over the New as a toponymic source. Most of the American
placenames with St. – are taken over
from the French or the Spanish, as are the frequent placenames still
untranslated from those languages: Sacramento, San Francisco,
and so many more than Whitman grew angry at their number and demanded their
renaming in secular terms. It didn’t come about. Placenames very quickly lose
their referential content beyond the place they name. They "mean” nothing more
than the place, and so Phoenix (AZ),
for example, become a different word from the phoenix that was a legendary
bird. By the same process, Sacramento has
no religious overtones for those who know it as a place, even though they may
also know something of the sacrament it was originally meant to recall. And
folk etymology often made oblivion certain. The place the Spanish called El Rio
de las Animas Predidas en Purgatorio (River of the Souls Lost in Purgatory) was
translated and shortened by the French into Purgatoire, and the Americans
who followed them imitated this as Picketwire.
Any resemblance between purgatory and picketwire is purely coincidental.
21. A name like the one the Spanish gave
this river is a reference to something else not present, as is most naming for
persons and places. But some placenames refer to the place itself by describing
it: Sugarloaf Mountain, for example, which looked like a sugarloaf to those who
had to name it, and Cedar Mountain,
which was covered with trees. Nowadays no one knows what a sugarloaf looks
like, so the name of the mountain is as abstract as if it had been Algonquian;
and chances are the cedars have all been cut down as well to make shingles for
houses where no sugarloaf will enter. No high school French course will enable
the American pupil to see in the Grand Teton mountains the original comparison to "big
breasts”, which may be why the name has been left untranslated. Descriptive
placenames have made a great comeback since World War II, for they appear to
lend a quaint and historical air to new subdivision developments. Oak Dell certainly sounds worth a down
payment, even if no oaks even grew within miles of the sport and the terrain is
perfectly flat; and Miry Run has the
same reassuring sound, at least until the customer remembers what miry means.
22. The most colorful names are the rarest. They
are found mostly in old accounts of the frontier and in books like this one.
Many of the most colorful have been civilized out of existence: in Canada,
Rat Portage became Kenora. But King of Prussia and
Intercourse still survive in Pennsylvania,
Tombstone
in Arizona,
and others elsewhere. Mencken claims that West Virginia is "full” of such placenames,
giving as proof Affinity, Bias, Big Chimney, Bulltown, Caress, Cinderella,
Cowhide, and Czar, just for the ABCs. But some of his examples are more madcap
than others, and they do not really "fill” the state. Truth or Consequences
(NM) is a recent alteration that needs no explanation. Almost self-explanatory
are the portmanteau or blendword placenames such as Calexico (on the California side of the Mexican border; Mexicali
is on the other side), Penn Yan (settled by Pennsylvanians and Yankees),
Delmarva (a common though unofficial name for the peninsula that is partly in Delaware, partly in Maryland,
partly in Virginia).
The blend process is relatively common in all varieties of the English
language, but as a source of placenames it seems to be distinctively American.
Questions
on Content
- Why is toponymics "essential to
a grasp of American English” ?
- What five categories of U.S. place names does Bolton
identity?
- Explain the origins of the
names Wisconsin
and Minnesota.
- Which states were named after
famous persons?
- Identify some U.S. place
names that are Dutch in origin. What kinds of things are they named after?
- Which source do you think
accounts for the most colorful place names?
Questions
on Structure and Style
- Examine the relationship
between paragraphs 1 and 2. What is the function of paragraph 2?
- What kind of transitions are
used in the first three paragraphs? Are the transitions in the rest of the
selection similar?
- We note Bolton’s
sense of humor in paragraph 6. Find other examples of his humor. What do
they tell us about him and about his attitude toward his subject?
- Are Bolton’s
examples appropriate? Does he include enough examples?
Assignments
- Study Bolton’s
five categories for the names of the fifty states. Then write an essay
classifying the place names in your region. (You may have to devise new
categories.)
- Write an essay discussing the
history of your region as reflected in its place names.
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