• @[email protected]
    link
    fedilink
    English
    2312 hours ago

    If you look deep enough, pretty much every city’s name is actually some banale description of the location or some guy who was relevant to it’s founding.

    • @ChickenLadyLovesLife
      link
      English
      134 minutes ago

      I only recently learned that Budapest was originally two separate cities on opposite sides of a river named Buda and Pest.

    • Skua
      link
      fedilink
      611 hours ago

      Examples of this in the cities of Scotland that we can actually trace the etymologies of:

      • Perth: “Copse”. Perth is in a forested area
      • Aberdeen: “Mouth of Devona’s river”. Devona was an old Celtic goddess, and Aberdeen actually lies between the mouths of two rivers named for her
      • Inverness: “Mouth of the roaring river”. Inver- derives from the Gaelic branch of the Celtic languages, whereas Aber- comes from the Brythonic branch. It’s at the mouth of the river Ness, which is one of the fastest-discharging rivers in the UK
      • Glasgow: “green hollow”. “Hollow” here is in the sense of a small valley. Glasgow is one of the rainiest cities in Europe and also has a remarkably temperate climate for being at the same latitude as Moscow, so it probably was very green before it became a city
    • @shalafi
      link
      English
      312 hours ago

      The rivers here are names of colors.