#place-names

[herniacin]

i've never got why we call it the pacific northwest instead of just the northwest like what are we specifying

[lady-laufey]

So I have a lot of opinions about Skyrim, etymology, and linguistics - particularly with regard to the history of the land as it’s been conquered by one invading army or another.

So far as I know, no in-game record exists of the land’s name as known to the Falmer and Dwemer who lived there before the Nords arrived, nor of the name of the Reach as known to the natives - unless we are to take it that the same language that produced words like Madanach, Markarth and Karthwasten also produced “the Reach.” So we don’t really know what sort of place-names the Nords erased when they invaded, save a few other words from the native languages.

Once the Nords supplanted the natives as “the” people of the land, though, I have a hard time believing that the same language that produced words like Haafingar, Hjerim and Morthal is what named the province “Sky-Rim.” Rather, my own headcanon is that the Nordic name for the land was, while still spelled Skyrim, pronounced Skyr-im, taking its name from skyr, a cultured dairy product with a long history in real-world Scandinavia and Iceland. I say this because I find it very odd that a people who came to their new homeland from the north would choose to refer to their new, more southern homeland as “the rim of the sky,” while “the land of tasty yogurt-like stuff” seems pretty sensible for a people fleeing a frozen, famine-struck wasteland like Atmora.

So how did it end up being Sky-Rim? As with many things in Tamriel, I blame the Empire. Once folks from Cyrodiil* move in, they assume the pronunciation of the name is just part of the weird accents the natives have, because Sky Rim, the Rim of the Sky? Makes perfect sense from their perspective as empire builders from the south, which, to them, is pretty much the only meaningful perspective.

*A lot of my headcanons about the political history of Tamriel are rooted in the firm belief that Talos of Atmora is a self-congratulatory fantasy of past glories projected onto a bloodthirsty marauder with no morals. I find it highly unlikely that Tiber Septim I ever belonged, in any meaningful way, to the ethno-cultural group called Nords.

[biosphereplace]

FINDING FIELD-NAMES (5) MARCH

Very often, where two farms meet, the fields are named after the adjoining farm. The field named Boreland March (right of drystone dyke) is on Carrick Farm while Big Carrick (left of drystone dyke) is on Boreland Farm.

March is from Old English mearc via Anglo-French marcheand Scots merche meaning a border. The March Dykes Act 1661 required neighbouring landowners to split the cost of building a shared boundary when the land was enclosed. In southwest Scotland the term march dyke is used to describe the boundary of a farm. It was usually the first drystone dyke built when a farm was enclosed and is often taller than the dykes built later to subdivide the farmland.

This dyke defines more than the boundary of two farms as it also marks the extent of an estate and parish. The boundary appears on a 1761 map and is annotated to show the line of the border as “the Bounding dyke of the Parks of Cally….and….the separation betwixt the Parishes of Girthon and Borgue”. The map was drawn to explain locations being considered in a dispute over dykes blocking traditional routes to fords crossing the River Fleet.

[westmeathlibrary]

Tips on how to identify an Irish place name from John Grenham in The Irish Times.

And don't forget to check the library for books on placenames : http://goo.gl/SP717n