"piotr gasiorowski" <
gpiot-@...> wrote:
original article:
http://www.egroups.com/group/cybalist/?start=1105
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: John Croft
> To: cybalist@eGroups.com
> Sent: Monday, January 24, 2000 6:47 AM
> Subject: [cybalist] 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
>
Thank you for your intersting replies to my original questions.
Piotr, you state that the Anglo-Saxon placename element *ham* means
*home*,
it can also mean (rarely) a *water-meadow*, examples of which are to be
found in the London suburbs, namely East and West Ham. This placename
element is also found in Germany, for example the town of Hamm, which
is situated near Dortmund, and, I'm speculating here, in Hamburg. No
doubt I will be corrected if this second example is incorrect.
Thanks
David James