Origins of Place Names: Interview with Duncan Madden

Hey everyone, I'm Ray Belli and this is Words for Granted, a podcast that looks at how words change over time. If you value the podcast as a free educational resource, you can support the show and get access to past bonus episodes by making a monthly donation at patreon.com/wordsforgranted. Thanks to Justin for their recent contribution. If Patreon isn't your thing but you still want to support the show, you can make a one-time donation at paypal.me/wordsforgranted. Before we begin, I want to acknowledge that this is the second interview episode in a row. I've had a lot of inbound interest in the past couple of months from authors and linguists about coming onto words for granted, so I'm going to release a few more of these back-to-back. I know it's a different format than most of you have been used to for the past six years, but I do think these conversations are just as fun and just as enlightening as some of the main episodes. I'd love to hear your thoughts on them too, either positive or negative, so shoot me an email at [email protected] or send me a DM on Twitter @wordsforgranted. Okay, onto today's episode in which I speak with Duncan Madden about the origins of place names. Duncan, thanks for coming onto the show. Thank you very much for having me, right? So you've had a career as a writer and more specifically as a travel writer. So tell us a little bit about how that has impacted your interest in place names as it relates to your latest book. I mean, I've always had, even before I started my career as a writer and a travel writer, I've always had a love and an interest of language. It was a drilled into me in my early youth. I had one of those mothers who was, if I had something to look up, if I needed to understand a word, she would make me look it up in the dictionary on the kind of idea that I would always remember it. And I think that gave me an intrinsic interest in words and meanings of words, even if I didn't particularly realise it at the time. And then, yes, over the years, as I started to travel a bit more and pursued my kind of love of writing, got into journalism, and then from there, when freelance, and started doing a lot more travel writing, the idea of just visiting all these place names, the more places I went to, the more interesting the names got. And hence the new book, right? Tell us about Founding Translation, the unexpected origins of place names. I was approached by a publishing house, big publishing house in the UK who read some of my writing and picked up on the idea of the etymology of place names, use some articles I'd written, and thought it would be, it would make a fascinative subject for a book, somewhere between a deep linguistic reference book, but also a travel log and something a bit more, telling the stories and the fantasies and a lot of the folk etymologies of these countries. And we conspired to come up with a plan and an outline for the book. I wanted to take something that I think a lot of people are interested in, but find intimidating and impenetrable and make it something that was actually a bit more digestible, a bit more fun and interesting to read, something you could pick up and put down, and there wasn't hundreds of pages of deeply complex, tracking of different languages throughout history, but rather told the stories of the countries, the histories, the adventures, the colonization, the migrations of all these peoples and how the names of these countries grew from these often unbelievable stories that you think couldn't even be written by Hollywood, some of these stories there, hilarious. And the more I dove into it, yeah, the more I realized they were just every country, almost every country has a pretty amazing story behind its name. Maybe that, you know, a modern name recently created or one that's come from deep in the annals of history. So that's what the book is. It's a tour around the world, 70 or so countries and the story of each, both the country's names, the end of names and their ex-names, so the names as given to them by the native speakers of the country and the names given to them by the visitors, the foreigners, other language names, primarily English language, obviously. Well, fantastic. So let's dig deeper into some of these place names and some of the broader ideas that you talk about in the book. So yeah, let's start broad. In the intro, you give us four kind of main categories into which place names typically fall in terms of how places actually get named, sort of the sort of methods by which naming happens. So let's take these one by one. What's the first category, if you will? Well, let's go with a very obvious one, which is land features. And I guess I should say the order is arbitrary, right? Any of these could have been number one. Yeah, definitely. One of them could have been number one. Absolutely, yes. And some are more popular than others, obviously, as well. But land features is definitely an extremely common one, especially the older names, I think a lot of the countries, the indigenous populations and indeed the people visiting for the first time, took the kind of the huge major landmarks of a lot of countries as the kind of the things to name them after. So lots of rivers and lots of mountains. So Haiti is a good example in the Caribbean, which was named by the Taino people who had migrated from South America, descended from the Arrowax of South America. They landed on the island of Hispaniola and named it the land of high mountains, which in the Taino language of the time was the word Haiti, H-A-Y-T-I. And so that's how we end up with the Haiti of today. Yeah, I mean, I guess that's sort of like you said, the most fundamental and obvious way of naming a place, especially for indigenous populations. Like you are here in this place, you identify what else is here, you call it by that name, and you're probably not trying to deliberately name the place in some sort of official way, you're just describing it for what it is. You know, oh, I'm here, the place with the rivers. I'm in the place with the mountains, the place with the tall trees, the place with no trees, whatever it might be. Absolutely, yes. I think further we're going to history. Obviously, a lot of indigenous peoples around the world, they almost deified a lot of the great landmarks of their countries, the mountains or the rivers, you know, the river was a source of life, it was a source of all life for them, you know, water and washing and food, et cetera. And so they became extremely important in their lives. And often when explorers would arrive on the countries and in the first greet the indigenous people, a lot of the names were taken from the words of those indigenous people used as they pointed at the things in their lands. So that's often how they came to be. And then they've been taken appropriated and over time bent and changed with the whimsies of time over until you end up with the names we have today. Okay, what's the next category of naming that place names fall into? As we're talking about land stuff, I would say that another one that's widely accepted is locational or directional features of places, so where they are based. Probably the most famous example of this would be Japan, which I think most people have heard it associated as the land of the rising sun. So that's actually likely a reference to Japan's location east of China. So the name originated in China and the name means looking to the east as the Chinese were towards Japan, that is where the sun rose from each morning and so Japan became the land of the rising sun. It made its way into the English language via Marco Polo, actually, he'd never even been to Japan, he was in China and heard Chinese people at the time talking about Nihon, just another word for Japan, ending in Japan. And he heard it pronounced as something like Duru Pann, J-R-R-R-P-A-N. And so it's kind of direct transliteration of that wrote it down as something along the lines of Japan and that's where Japan comes from today. But Japan means yes, land of the rising sun, named for its location to the east of China. Yeah, so here you have an endonym, a Chinese endonym for Japan that then passes into the mouth of an Italian and then that italianization then spreads out to other European languages and then they adapted in their sort of own phonology. Yes, and that becoming an exonym through the kind of mis-translational, the misunderstanding or the mispronunciation or the misinterpretation, if you like. And this is probably an important point and I'm sure you've discussed this just in the realms of etymology before on your podcast, on your show. There is a lot of piecing together of information, bits of information here. So it's not guaranteed that all of these things etymology is a kind of a wide-ranging subject that takes leaps of faith and it takes interpretations and it takes connections and kind of educated guesswork a lot of the time. So it's not set in stone, but it's a fairly strong, there are lots of linguistic indicators you do through over time that show that that's where Japan comes from. But it's not set in stone, let's put it like that. Sure. Okay, next on our list of categories? Okay, so the third one would be countries who are now ydy'r egurnuors a craenaedos i'n directlywaith hynny, anblade. Well, aceronfedに bainnau, betho nhw nasafid o slat wyddeg wedi gallwf i hostio a rheial aroma fryni. Lwedodd eu elgaio ei gð难rty Kevin passon 8 o Rwyny Târ yn llain a eu rhyw ymgelmerfa. A y Trybedd amol mai i'u僅b. Yn gydyn yn ymgelmerfa, ac yn ymgelmerfa, ac yn ymgelmerfa, ac yn ymgelmerfa. Mae'n gydyn yn ymgelmerfa, mae'n gydyn yn ymgelmerfa. Giormoniaeth yn ymgelmerfa, mae'n gydyn yn ymgelmerfa. Mae'n gydyn yn ymgelmerfa, mae'n gydyn yn ymgelmerfa, mae'n gydyn yn ymgelmerfa. Mae'n gydyn yn ymgelmerfa. a place, say, being accidentally named or have hazardly named. Sure. I mean, there are many. There are some beauties as well. I mean, place names aren't random. They almost always have a definitive source, but there are lots of random factors that influence and shape and change them over time, which sounds slightly contradictory. But this in particular way is that they're always at some time determined. And at some point as well, in the world we live in now, in the UN list of country names, they have all been ratified and made official at some point. But some are literally, like you said, sat down and decided at a table. Often in the case of countries gaining their independence and others are just, they appear random, but they have just developed over time in a kind of logical and organic way. But then there are others, like you say, that are just classically misunderstandings. I mean, Senegal is one of the great ones. And again, this is element of focus, etymology about this, but it's something that's taken a real place in history. Senegal was named by the Portuguese. When the Portuguese were exploring West Africa in the 15th century, they were touring down the west coast of Africa. Etymology was posited by a French author and priest named David Boylatt in the mid-19th century. And he proposed the notion that sometimes in the 1440s, prior to all of the European nations coming, the Danish and the English, etc. The Portuguese were exploring the coastline of Africa. And they were looking for the entrance to the Senegal River, which at the time was kind of known as the river of gold, because it was a mouth, a waterway that led all the way into the super-gold, which empires of Marley and Ghana. And so it was an important area for them to explore and to exhibit some control over. So there was a Portuguese prince called Henry the Navigator, who found that the mouth of this river of gold, after an alleged 20 years looking for it, which is mind-blowing and it's own right. But he eventually found this sentence and immediately turned and sailed upstream. And after a while he happened upon some natives fishing from their canoe or in their language, or what we would call a pyrogue, which is like a hollowed out dug out canoe. So Henry the Navigator attempted contact with them to start a trying to speak to them, obviously in the Portuguese at the time, and asked them the name of the place to which their locals responded. "Soonu, gal, and again, pronunciation, I will just leave it at that." But obviously there was the Portuguese, the Portuguese sailors didn't speak the local dialects, which is known as Volf, and the local, the indigenous people didn't speak Portuguese. And so the Frenchman Boilack proposed that their locals misunderstood Henry's question. And instead he assumed what they were fishing in. So they said, "Oh, we're in asoonu, gal." And he took that to me, the name of the nation, "Soonu, gal," which he then translated as Senegal. So that's how the name Senegal came to be. Now this is a slight, there is a focus on homology element of this. It's a long and established story. Many linguist scholars don't think it holds much weight, but something curious has happened with that, which is that the Senegalese people themselves have embraced it, embraced the notion of Senegal as a boat. And it's a boat that they are all in together. And this has given them a kind of a national identity. They've taken it as a symbol to frame their collective mindset, and that they're all in the same boat together. And this is what it means to be Senegalese. And they've used this, you know, they've used this in a kind of really powerful way to create a bond, which has helped develop and solidify their culture and their identity. And that has helped shape Senegal into one of the most politically stable and progressive and successful countries in Africa. In some sense, the factuality of the etymology in terms of its cultural significance, or its import on the national consciousness doesn't actually matter. Right? It might matter for linguistics scholars and rightfully. But in the context here, it's doing something culturally powerful, regardless of its facticity. I think if you ask the average Senegalese person on the street, they're probably quite happy with that definition and embracing that national identity, and I'm probably happy to skim over some of the linguistic inconsistencies that might exist within it. But it's, again, it's a really lovely story, it's a really evocative story, and it creates a really strong sense of the culture and identity of the country. And that's why it's endured. That's why the story is endured just as long as the name has, because people like to have it. I can give you an idea of something on the flip side of that, if you like, with a country not too far away from Senegal, which would be a name that was more deliberately chosen. Bikina Faso is a really great example of that, actually. So Bikina Faso has a pretty modern name, a country that was colonized and suffered a really, you know, a very difficult history under the hands of the colonies. But it became, it took on its current name, Bikina Faso, only in 1984. So, you know, you're talking, what's that, 30, 40 years ago, less than 40 years ago. So the name itself was created by one guy, a guy called Thomas Sankara, who was a Marxist revolutionary, who hated the French, and he hated the French colonial legacy. He was known as the Che Guevara of Africa. And Sankara came to power, and he lived this. He had a very famous legacy behind him. He lived this very reduced life. He wasn't wealthy. He didn't flaunt any money, which was definitely different at the time. And he was deeply critical of the neocolonialism of everybody from the French to also institutions in the modern world, like the IMF, the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. And so he, he decided that he was going to stand up to the French in a big way, and he was going to be vocal about it. And when he was president, he told the country's creditors that he wouldn't be repaying them with the classic line. We cannot repay the debt because we are not responsible for this debt. On the contrary, others owe us something that no money can pay for, that is to say the debt of blood. And so he refused to accept any foreign aid, and he uttered the infamous quote as well. He who feeds you controls you. So he was really pro-independent, anti-canolonialism. And to reflect on this, he decided to give his country a new name, and he was very smart about it indeed. He wanted a name that incorporated and included everybody that lived within the boundaries of the country that he had named Bikina Faso. So on the 4th of August 1984, he created Bikina Faso. There was two words from two languages, both widely spoken within the country. Bikina comes from the Moray language, and Faso comes from the Dueler language. Bikina means men of integrity, stand-up men, and Faso means the father land or literally in the father's house. So put them together, they kind of create, revoke this meaning of the land of honest men, the land of upright men. Because he wanted to use the name, almost like a marketing tool, to kind of show the integrity of the people, and that they would stand up for themselves, that they would not shy down in the face of Camelonias. And then he took it a step further, which was very smart indeed. So he called the citizens of the country of Bikina Faso. He called them the Bikina Bay, and this, the Bay suffix, the B.E. on the end, with the Gravaxent over the E. This comes from a third national language. It's a suffix that's used in a third language within the country, full-full day. And this means men or women. So what he did was by creating this term for the citizens of the country. He incorporated a third language to make more people feel apart and belong to the country. But he also incorporated both genders, men and women into this, you know, it's not the land of honest men in his language. It would be the land of honest men and women. And so he came up with this brilliant name that incorporated multiple languages, incorporated both genders, and it backed up his legacy of the country being independent upright and able to stand on its own two feet. And that legacy lives on for him. Unfortunately, if it's Sankara, he had a slightly bad time of it. He continued to vote be very, very vocal against the French and the rest of the world. And in the end, he was assassinated three or four years after he created the name by the guy who gave him power in the first place. He didn't go on to see the legacy continue, but his name lives on and will no doubt live on for a long time. And yeah, it's one of my favourites because I think it's powerful, inclusive, smart, savvy. And also it's cool, but keen a fasa, I think it's a great name. Do you know what the region or country or territory name was prior to this? Yes, before it gained independence. So again independence in 1960. So it still took a long time for them to change their names. But when it took over independence from the French, it was the Republic of the Republic of the Upper Volta, the Upper Volta being a river that runs through the country. The Volta River is composed of three smaller rivers, which is the black vault of the white vault during the red vault. And they actually can support the country. to use those colors to make the flag of the country as well. So under French hands, it was the Republic of the U.S. of Ulta. All right, so I'm going to shift gears here a little bit. What's striking when you look at a map is that you'll find similar suffixes, such as IA, IA, or just A, and then Stan is another one. And there might be some others that I'm not thinking of off the top of my head. But what do these particular suffixes mean that we see IA and Stan? The obvious third one I would say just to add to IA and Stan would be land, which is funny because it's easy to just forget and overlook that. But yes, land is the same. So they're at breadcrumbs trail, they show the impact and the legacy of cultures and empires, many of which no longer exist and the legacy they've left on the world. So IA, the suffix IA, so from Australia to Zambia, many, many, many countries around the world. The IA is a Latin suffix, Latinize, and it means land of. And the Stan of which you see this big grouping of countries with Stan as the suffix in central and northern Asia, from Afghanistan to Uzbekistan. The Stan means pretty much the same thing. It's a loose interpretation rather than specific, but it means really land of territory of or place that you reside in, something along those lines. So much as land means in England and Finland and New Zealand, for example. So they all mean very much the same thing, land of. It's a way, a linguistic characteristic, if you like, to help identify these words as place names. Uzbekistan is the land of the Uzbeks, Finland, the land of the Finns, etc, etc. The same linguistic characteristic continues not just in country names, but you'll see it in city names as well, I mean, and across different languages. So you could look at, in the state's Nashville, for example, the Ville is the French word for town, or you have Edinburgh in the UK in Scotland, capital of Scotland, and the berg is similar to words like Barry and Barra, and it's from the Old English word, which means a fortified enclosure. So you will see these characteristics carried through, not just country names, but place names, state names, Pennsylvania, for example, you know, there you go. It's the same, it's got that same I.A suffix on the end. So it's not just country names, but in place names in general it tends to, these themes tend to have emerged and stuck over time. Actually, Pennsylvania is a good example of the lasting impact of Latin even long after the fall of the Roman Empire. Obviously, the state of Pennsylvania was not founded during Roman times, but was named in a sort of neoclassical trend that was popular in, it's not America, colonial America. There was neoclassical flair in naming a lot of places during that time. What's interesting about the name England is that it's kind of easy to forget the word land is in England, just because of the pronunciation shift of that last vowel, how that A in land has become a schwa, just like a sound. It's not in land, we say, in land. I'll give you something slightly, just slightly off the cuff with England. England was obviously the land of the Angles, it was known as Angle land. And it became, as during its over time, as it shrunk from the land of the Angles, Angla land down to England, it went through a phaser, it was known as Inglaland. And that extra "la" in the middle is something linguistic, professor, I think they call it haplology, which is the kind of the addition of an extra unnecessary bit in the middle of the word. And I love this because, obviously, haplology has that in it as well. So there's quite a meta-joke in there somewhere about linguistics. Linguist refer into haplology as haplology in a nod to their own thing. But yeah, I always liked that about England that thought that it was Inglaland, makes me chuckle. Yeah, well, as any longtime listener of this podcast will know, is that what we colloquially will refer to as linguistic laziness is very common. If there's a path of least resistance in language, typically, we naturally take it over time, whether that's in a century or five centuries, syllables, slur, contractions form, words tend to get shorter over time, etc. Well, Duncan, this has been fantastic and enlightening conversation. Before we wrap, are there any last things that you want to say about the book or any last story from the book that you want to share? And then let's close out with where listeners can find you and buy the book, etc. Well, I could tell it kind of slightly abbreviated story of a couple of the more interesting country names and how they came to be. Yeah, that'd be great. That'd be great. Okay. One of my favorite etymologies, it's complex, but it's a proper matinee afternoon, kind of Indiana Jones style story of exploration and daring do and survival in the face of great odds is the name of Argentina, which is a beautiful country, country I love very much. So Argentina is next to a river, which is famously known as the Río de La Plata, the river of silver, which is the river that separates it from Uruguay to the north. River took its name from a legend that was prolific in Olden times, which is the legend of the Sierra de La Plata, which was a mythical mountain of silver that was located somewhere in the South American interior. And this story spread like wildfire throughout Europe, through the explorers and the settlers and the fortune seekers, it became a really, really popular topic. So in 1516, a navigator and explorer called Juan Diaz de Solis led an expedition to the new world, and he was in search of a sea passage that would connect the Atlantic to the Pacific. This was a very mythic quest in the kind of 1516 centuries. And he arrived at the Río de La Plata and thought, okay, maybe this is the entrance that I've been looking for. So he sailed up it in search of the Pacific, but unfortunately him and his crew ended up being caught and killed by an indigenous group of a, they believed Guarani people or maybe Charu or people. Unfortunately, there weren't very many witnesses because most of them were eaten, but there were a handful of survivors. One of them was a Portuguese conquistor called Alexel Garcia, and he survived and he made it back out of the river, and he got on another boat, and unfortunately he was sailing up the coast when that boat crashed and and sunk, and he survived that as well, but he was stuck somewhere around in Uruguay. But whilst he was there waiting and you know living and deciding if he was going to be rescued, etc., he found this, he started to hear all these accounts of this great white king who saw over a land incomparably rich in silver and splendor that was somewhere to the west at the foot of the Sierra de La Plata, this kind of mythical mountain of silver. And so he became intrigued and completely obsessed with this, and he spent eight years living among the Guarani people, the people who had supposedly eaten most of his compatriots on the initial voyage, and during that time he charted something called the Piaveru, which is the Guarani's kind of network of trails that covered the region in this general area, Uruguay, Argentina, and then further up into Paraguay in Central America, south, central South America. And he spent a lot of time charting these routes and gathering together an army and the supplies to make an assault on this, go and find this great white king and claim the riches for his own. And he was pretty successful, he traveled him with some Europeans and many thousand Guarani as an army, and he eventually reached the edge of the Inca Empire, that obviously obviously the source of the silver. He looted a lot, he managed to get in, get a lot of silver and then get out, and he was sailing back thinking he was successful and he'd kind of answered this mythical quest and had succeeded. When unfortunately some of the allies that he was with another tribe called the Piagua ambushed and killed him at last he succumbed. But a few of the Guarani he was with escaped and made it back out of the country and told the tale of the Sierra de la Plata, the Rio de la Plata, this kind of country of silver, and they emerged with this into Argentina rich in silver. And so you think, okay, Argentina is the land of silver, so that makes complete sense. But the curiosity is that Sierra de la Plata is Spanish whereas Argentina is in Italian word, and it's Italian for silver. So how come we have an Italian name for a country that was defined by the Spanish name for silver? And that is curious to me, I was very interested in that because I didn't really understand how this could be. And again it comes back to those Venetian and Genoese navigators and cartographers of the Oasis, which is much like America of a Sputia who we talked about with America earlier. So they started making their own maps of the area at the time. And because they were Italian they wrote the maps in their own language, so when people were talking about the. Sierra de la Plata and the Rio de la Plata, they were using the word Argentina. And so their maps became prolific, became everywhere. And so therefore it was the Argentina name that survived and became known as the Land of Silver. Even though the river, just to the north of them, remained the Rio de la Plata in Spanish. Yeah, and also just that element of, you know, maybe chance puts it too lightly. Maybe that's not the right word, but the fact that these Italian maps were the ones that got around. If history played out differently, if there were different political and economic forces at the time, we might have a German name for it or an English name for it or Portuguese or whatever. It's just the fact that we have an Italian name is totally contingent on what was going on in the world of cartography during that particular time in history, right? Absolutely, absolutely. Yes, this is where we talked earlier on about country names on random, but there are many random effectors that affect and refine and shape them. So yeah, and Argentina films, it feels like an etymology that needs to be made into a movie to me. Okay, well, Duncan, thank you again for coming on to the show. Before we leave, let listeners know where they can find out more about you and your work. And then where they can order or pre-order the book if you're here in the States. So you can find me online, Duncan Madden. I think if you Google me, you'll probably see some results because I write a lot of travel journalism online. I have a website, DuncanMadden.com, which has my kind of editorial, journalistic stuff on there and that has information about my book as well. My book is for sale in the UK, the world's greatest travel book shop, Stanfords in London, going since the 1850s, they've been very kindly picked it as their book of the month for December. So you can order it online there. If you're in Europe and the UK, obviously, it's on Amazon as well. And in the US, it will be available on multiple online platforms and hopefully in some of the bigger bookshorts as well. But you can find all the details on my website, which is DuncanMadden.com. Okay, fantastic. Well, Duncan, thanks again for coming on to the show. Ray, thank you so much for having me. It's been great to talk about. I really appreciate the time.