Places in the US that are named after place-names in other countries but are pronounced differently have always bothered me. When I lived in Minnesota there was a New Prague. Now, one might expect this to be pronounced like new “prah-g” but no, it was not. They called it new “pray-g”. Like fingernails on a chalkboard. I’d accept new “praha” like the Czech would say. The Minnesotans have another terrible one: Montevideo. Guess how they pronounce that.
Cairo, Illinois is a terrible one, too. They say “kay-ro” instead of “k-eye-ro” like civilized folks. The Mississippi is known as the American Nile. Thus, the city of Memphis is named after the Egyptian city. Shouldn’t we pronounce Cairo like the other major city on the Nile? Bah humbug.
The toponymy of placenames in America, that is, the origins and reasons places are named what they are here is an interesting topic in that many can be deduced with a little historical or contextual familiarity.
Many English suffixes can be found in the US because of the wholesale borrowing of these placenames by the settlers coming across the Atlantic. To confuse matters, many surnames of Europeans come from the places where the family was from, thus placenames in the US might be a placename in Europe if named after the European placename or named after the European person that happens to have a placename… surname.
It’s difficult to find the exact origin of some placenames due to these ambiguities. Furthermore, the languages of the British Isles, Germany, and even France all have words with common origins. The language families are branched from the same ancestors such as the Old English/Old Norse/Anglo-Saxon similarities through the modern Germanic branches. The history of Normandy in northern France and the Norman invasions of England mix up those languages as well.
German placenames seem to be more commonly taken directly from the placename in Germany where the settlers came from. Many Midwestern cities are named after German places like Berlin and Hamburg. Others follow the established practice of prefixing the placename with “New” such as New Berlin, Wisconsin, or New Ulm, Minnesota.
French-influenced placenames utilize the suffix -ville but also include lots of La- prefixes, -eau/eaux suffixes, and names of popular people like Lafayette. Spanish placenames often start with Los, San, and Santa. But numerous places are undoubtedly of Spanish origin without a prefix or suffix, such as the many Pueblos in the US.
English Influenced Placenames
-borough/boro is an English (ultimately an Old English, and therefore arguably also a Germanic suffix) place-name suffix that usually refers to a castle. It is the same meaning in most cases as the German placenames that end with burg because both languages share a common ancestor. Borough is often shortened to boro as in the case of Murfreesboro, Tennessee which was first called Murfreesborough. This suffix became popular before the American Revolution. It declined in use after the Revolution.
-burg/burgh is an English (and Scottish) suffix referring to a city or town. Pittsburgh was named after the British statesman William Pitt. The spellings and misspellings of this city were argued over and variously written as Pittsburgh, Pittsbourgh, and Pittsburg until the “h” was locked in on July 19, 1911. The suffix can also be considered Germanic because of the commonalities between old Germanic languages and Old English. In the Germanic sense the word usually refers to fortresses and walled towns. A lot of cities in the US with this suffix are not named after German places, but just use this German suffix. The origins of these placenames get fuzzy because English, Scottish, German, and French placenames use similar suffixes. In French the suffix is found as “bourg”. This suffix became popular before the American Revolution. But it did remain popular after the revolution and was commonly appended to personal names.
-town/ton suffixes on placenames in the US were used when a suffix was needed, such as when a place was named after a person which became a common occurrence in the middle of the 18th century onwards. An example is the city of Charleston, South Carolina named after King Charles II of England. Another example is Trenton, New Jersey named after the founder William Trent. This suffix became popular before the American Revolution.
Mapping this info onto state boundary data using the following SQL to query US-designated places to reveal:
NAME LIKE ‘%ton’ Or NAME LIKE ‘%town’ Or NAME LIKE ‘%borough’ Or NAME LIKE ‘%boro’ Or NAME LIKE ‘%burg’ OR NAME LIKE ‘%borough’
Spanish Influenced Placenames
san/santa- prefixes are of Spanish origin meaning “saint”. There are many US cities named after Catholic saints in this fashion. Prominent examples are San Francisco (Saint Francis), San Juan (Saint John) and Santa Anna (Saint Anna). Santa Fe means Holy Faith in Spanish.
el/la/las/los- means “the” in English. Probably the most common example is Los Angeles, meaning “The Angles”. Another example is Los Alamos, meaning poplars as in poplar trees. Las Vegas means “The Meadows”.
Mapping this info onto state boundary data using the following SQL to query US-designated places reveal:
NAME LIKE ‘San %’ Or NAME LIKE ‘Santa %’ Or NAME LIKE ‘Los %’ Or NAME LIKE ‘La %’ OR NAME LIKE ‘Las %’ OR NAME LIKE ‘El %’
French Influenced Placenames
-ville is a French-influenced suffix meaning farm and it has commonality with words villa and village. It might also refer to earlier meanings of farm or village. This suffix was almost completely unused in American placenames until after the American Revolution. This is attributed to the pro-French sentiments that spread through America after the war. Louisville, Kentucky is an example of this naming convention as well as the reason in that it was to honor the French king who was supporting the Revolution. The decline of the use of the suffix “town” can likewise be attributed to the declining sentiments towards the British in relative terms. Unlike -burg usually modifying a personage, -ville was appended to a variety of words to create a placename. It was most popular in the southern and western Appalachian regions while it was less popular in New England.
Mapping this info onto state boundary data using the following SQL to query US designated places reveal:
NAME LIKE ‘%ville’
I think an interesting follow up to this would be to collect lists of placenames in the US that have origins in, say, France to find locations that borrow French placenames instead of just the suffixes. If I collect this data for the large immigrant waves to the US including English, French, Spanish, and German it might reveal more complete maps of where placenames originated from in the US.
What do you think?