09-27-2006, 01:38 PM
You bring up good points, Vortigern, as always. Note that many forts were built in Britain and of course, elsewhere, and generally ended with the word "Castrum", for "fort". And there are dozens at least of places in England now named "-chester", which is the Anglicized Latin...so the Latin was adopted by the residents, and after the Romans left, the names stuck, and evolved into the indigenous language.
I can't say that's true everywhere, but it's true in Britain, anyway. Odds are, the places and people wouldn't have thought it strange at the time, either.
You're also right about the same thing happening in the US. Many place names are "Native American" names, somewhat modified into English, and as you point out, rivers and regions (Tuskoseegee, Mississippi, Monongahela, Connecticut, Minnesota, hundreds more) are all Indian names. A map of North Carolina, for example, has many dozens of Indian names.
I suppose it would be true that the Celt names in Gaul were replacements for any settlements of the previous dwellers, too, and they replaced the names of their Paleolithic predecessors. So it's not so much a forcing of change of language by threat of the sword, but by cultural assimilation and by the need of the vanquished to communicate with the conquerors, IMO.
(For the benefit of any other aboriginal decendants in the US, I'm partly Trail of Tears decendant Cherokee, so I put "Native American" in quotes, but generally use the word Indian for simplicity. Neither is really accurate, since this isn't India, and we aren't native to this continent; we just walked in a while before they sailed in. Humans are not native to North America, we're all immigrants at some point. Not intended as a slur on anyone, that's just the facts.)
I can't say that's true everywhere, but it's true in Britain, anyway. Odds are, the places and people wouldn't have thought it strange at the time, either.
You're also right about the same thing happening in the US. Many place names are "Native American" names, somewhat modified into English, and as you point out, rivers and regions (Tuskoseegee, Mississippi, Monongahela, Connecticut, Minnesota, hundreds more) are all Indian names. A map of North Carolina, for example, has many dozens of Indian names.
I suppose it would be true that the Celt names in Gaul were replacements for any settlements of the previous dwellers, too, and they replaced the names of their Paleolithic predecessors. So it's not so much a forcing of change of language by threat of the sword, but by cultural assimilation and by the need of the vanquished to communicate with the conquerors, IMO.
(For the benefit of any other aboriginal decendants in the US, I'm partly Trail of Tears decendant Cherokee, so I put "Native American" in quotes, but generally use the word Indian for simplicity. Neither is really accurate, since this isn't India, and we aren't native to this continent; we just walked in a while before they sailed in. Humans are not native to North America, we're all immigrants at some point. Not intended as a slur on anyone, that's just the facts.)
M. Demetrius Abicio
(David Wills)
Saepe veritas est dura.
(David Wills)
Saepe veritas est dura.
