the Wheel and Dating PIE

[JoatSimeon at aol.com]

>sonno3 at hotmail.com writes:

>The largest percentage of Brittonic elements are in Western England, including
>Cumberland, Westmorland, and Lancashire as well as Shropshire, Worcestershire,
>North East Herefordshire, Western Gloucestershire and, of course, Devon and
>Cornwall.

-- true, the process of Germanization seems to have been both slower and less
complete in these western areas (Cornish surviving into the 17th century, and
the provisions for "Welsh" persons in the early Wessex law codes).

Even there, however, there are placename features which show incomprehension
-- besides the "river river" ones, there are the "hill hills".

You often get these types of names in situations of limited bilingualism.

Eg.,  Lake Malawi was, for a long time, called "Lake Nyasa", because of the
explorer Livingston's lousy chiChechwa.  He pointed at the lake and asked a
Malawian "what's that lake?" in what he thought was the local language.  The
peasant, who didn't understand a word he said, replied "That's the
_lake_".... which in chiChechwa, is of course "nyasa".  So the lake was "Lake
Lake" for several generations.

There's a town in Madagascar whose name means "you can tie up your boat down
there" for similar reasons.

One can imagine a Saxon grunting out something and pointing, at which the
bewildered Briton says "That's the _river_," or "That's the _hill_".