--- In
cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "Brian M. Scott" <BMScott@...>
wrote:
> At 6:56:18 AM on Monday, January 5, 2004, tgpedersen wrote:
>
> > England is full of -tun place names. They are found on the
> > continent too (very few in Scandinavia), especially in the
> > area around Calais.
>
> The English <-tu:n> names do not appear to belong to the
> earliest layer of settlement names; in the earliest records
> (to 731) <-ha:m> is the most common habitative element, and
> there are just a handful of <-tu:n> names. Cameron has
> suggested that <-tu:n> names were not being formed in great
> numbers before the end of the 7th century.
Nielsen again:
" It is interesting that in some of the *ingahaim place names in the
Pas-de-Calais the reflex of /ai/ is /a:/ and not /e:/ (as it is in
the great majority of cases, cf Flemish/MDu /e:/ < /ai/, cf
UUidingaham, Boningaham (844/64, copy 962), etc (Gysseling 1948:73),
interesting not only because /ai/ always becomes /a:/ in Old English
but also because -(inga)ha:m names are generally believed to
antedate -tu:n names in England... The implication here, of course,
is that there may have been Anglo-Saxon settlers in the Pas-de-Calais
even earlier than suggested by the -thun names" (or that would-be
Anglo-Saxon settlers stayed there temporarily)."
"Gysseling (1969:30) who thinks that the *-inga-haim type of place
names arose in the Pas de Calais as a Germanic parallel to Romance
-iaca-villa (curte) [one is reminded of the present double
(Flemish/French) names of Belgian places, similar bilingualism
then?], suggests that *-ingahaim may have expanded from this area to
not only Flanders, Brabant, Holland, etc. but also England, cf Pas-de-
Calais forms like Machingahem (pre-700) Fresingahem (766), etc. In
some cases, there are parallel formations south and north of the
straits of Dover, cf Berningahem (844/64), Birmingham (Derolez
1974:11) [So there might have been a relation between the two places
during the Anglo-Saxon colonisation. Question: was English Birmingham
a center of expansion and conquest then?]. It might be added that the
ending -iacas (cf. the usual Gallo-Roman place-name suffix -iacum)
cropped up in place-names north of the Seine after the Frankish
conquest of Northern France. Possibly the suffix was equated with Gmc
n/apm. -ingas - at least this is what Gyssling (1969:14-18, 1973:232-
6) thinks."
Torsten