Re: Town and Fence

Mark, in reply to David's point

>>One English word which has interested me for some time is the English

word

>>*town* which was derived from the Anglo-Saxon *tun* meaning a

settlement. >>This word is of course found in thousands of English place-names such as

>>Workington, Darlington, Southampton etc. I believe that the word was

used in

>>this context from a very early period of Anglo-Saxon settlement in

what is >>now England. What puzzles me is that there does not seem to a corresponding

>>usage in north German,Dutch or Frisian place-names, indeed the word

appears

>>to be relatedto the German *Zaun* which means a fence. Did the term >>originally mean a fence rather than a settlement and does it imply

that the

>>Anglo-Saxon settlers surrounded their settlements with fences for

defensive

>>purposes perhaps? Maybe it suggests a border or boundary (between

landowners

>>?). Are there any related words in other Germanic and indeed

Indo-European

>>languages and if so are they ever used in the English sence of

settlement. Mark replied

>On-line dictionary of postulated non-IE substrate vocabulary in the

Germanic

>languages suggests *dunum could be Celtic. It could also be part of the >non-Indo-European substrate in Germanic. Approximately one-third of

the >ancient Germanic vocabulary is non-IE. English and High German ('Standard >German') are relatively distant from each other. English preserves some words >(some IE, some non-IE) not otherwise found, even in Dutch, Frisian, or other >Low German languages.

> >The various words for city and town frequently developed from terms

for >'enclosed place', 'fortress', 'fenced area'. Even family farmsteads formed >some sort of enclosure, often linked with fencing to keep-in or keep-out >animals. A town could be nothing more than a few buildings forming a circle >around a central open space. When you don't have a word for 'town', using your >word for 'enclosure', 'fenced area', 'corral', etc., is an easy semantic >extension. The origins of tun in the Celtic makes a great deal of sense when as John Morris has shown by plotting locations of "ton" shows that these are communities (eg the Thames Valley, Northumberland etc) where a Saxon and a British Celtic population lived side by side for a long period. Dun names too survived in Britain (eg. London, Dundee etc). Another case of a "submerged" substrate language in operation. It is interesting too the linkage between the cases you quote Dave in the Workington, Darlington etc. Ing comes from the Saxon = Ingas, which was frequently used to devote a tribal affiliation. In the Saxon settlement of Britain they were invited in as foederates, to help reid Britain of troubles with Picts and Scots (i.e. Irish). As such various groups were settled close to (but not in) various Celtic "dunum" to which the tribal name eventually succeeded the earlier British one. "Ham" is a term that is widely found eg. Hampshire etc. has a different meaning which escapes me at the moment. Hope this helps John