At 2:21:05 PM on Friday, March 21, 2008, fournet.arnaud
wrote:
>> I was wondering also if Hoby might be *Hod-by "Chatti
>> village", there are some Hodby's in England.
> I thought British-Isles place-names
> in -by and -thorp were
> dating back to the Northmen.
> Can it be they are earlier and
> Angles/Saxons creations ?
Names in <-by> definitely show Scandinavian influence. The
situation with <-thorp> is more complicated. There was an
OE <þorp> ~ <þrop> 'a farm, a village', and it was used as a
place-name element before the arrival of the Scandinavians.
In the Danelaw the two elements are largely indistinguishable,
but the high density of <-thorp> names there suggests that a
great many of them are of Scandinavian origin. Outside the
Danelaw the OE element seems to be associated especially
with the West Saxons.
<Hoby> is in record as <Hobie> 1086, <Hoby> from 1212 on,
<Houbi, -by> from sometime after 1150 through 1454, and
<How(e)by> ~1291-1629. This is entirely consistent with the
usual derivation from OE <ho:h> 'a spur of land' and <by:>:
'the farm or village at the spur of land'. As the later
medieval spellings suggest, the local pronunciation was
['hu:bi], pointing to an original /o:/.
I've not run across <Hodby> as a place-name, and without
early forms I'd not try to guess at an etymology for the
first element: there are far too many reasonable
possibilities.
Brian