Re: Pliny's "Guthalus"

--- In cybalist@..., x99lynx@... wrote:

> One more thing -- unless we are neo-platonists, we should assume

that there

> were no "true names" for rivers. I was in North Carolina recently

and

> noticed that historians can't identify with any certainty the old
> inlets/harbors on the barrier islands in that American state

because the

> early English explorers kept using the same names for different

sites, giving

> different map coordinates each time. This matches up with reports

from the

> western US that each Native American village along the Missouri

River would

> have a different name for that river, even among the same tribes.

The name

> changed around every bend. It makes just as much sense to think

that formal

> river names are all recent innovations -- coming with map making or
> centralized administrative naming -- which picked up a local name

or a vague

> name from the Classical writers and made it the name for the whole

river.

> Roman or Greek or other "authorities" picked up some vague name
> unintentionally and ended up giving that name to later generations

who took

> it as written in stone, even when they had to guess which river was

which. It

> may be Pliny who first named Gote alv, when later authorities read

the

> hearsay and decided they knew which river he was talking about.

And then

> later authorities would prove Gote Alv could not be Guthalus --

even though

> Pliny didn't have the vaguest idea of what river he was referring

to, in the

> first place.

The locals don't really need a name for their river; it is very much
just 'the river'. (For example, I don't think I have ever _heard_
the name of the river that runs through the town I live in!) However
traders, and any others who use various waterways, would need a name,
and may therefore be the effective namers. One may even need a name
to discuss fords. Trading goes back a very long way - Mesolithic at
least! What relatively static locals call the river is largely
irrelevant.

The one exception to the pronciple of naming that I can think of is
an overwhelmingly dominant river. For that, a phrase such as 'the
main river' might suffice. After all, in English we don't really
have a single name for our planet! (Is it Earth? Is it Terra?)

Richard.