Re: Pliny's "Guthalus"

From: Richard Wordingham
Message: 15920
Date: 2002-10-04

--- 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.