Siouan place name (Elkhorn)

[ROOD DAVID S]

For what it's worth, my maternal grandmother told me her parents came from
[norfork] in England.  The actual spelling of the place, however, is
"Norfolk".  Somewhere I heard that the local dialect there in England had
shifted the "l" to an "r" -- so it would only take immigrants from that
part of England to be the name-givers, and all the other roundabout
stories can be considered folk (fork) etymology.

David S. Rood
Dept. of Linguistics
Univ. of Colorado
295 UCB
Boulder, CO 80309-0295
USA
rood at colorado.edu

On Tue, 15 Jun 2004, Rory M Larson wrote:

>
>
>
>
> > On Mon, 14 Jun 2004, Louis Garcia wrote:
> >> In Dakota any fork in an object (in this case River) is called Ojate or
> >> Fork. Is it possible that the Town of Elkhorne, NE is near a fork, or
> >> where the Elkhorn River enters the main River. later, Louie
>
> > Actually the town in question is called Norfolk, NE, which is pronounced
> > Norfork, I gather, but this is just English phonology and hasn't anything
> > to do with forks.
>
> The story I've heard-- I can't remember the source-- is that
> the name is indeed for the fork.  It seems the town was named
> by early Scandinavian settlers in the 19th century who sent
> their application to Washington for the name of Norfork, i.e.
> "North Fork".  The Anglicanoid bureaucrats in Washington
> assumed the hicks wanted to name their town after the Virginia
> town of Norfolk, itself named after the English shire.
> Accordingly, they accepted the name, but "corrected" the
> spelling.  When this got back to Nebraska, the citizens of
> the town were in a quandary.  They wanted the name of "Norfork",
> but found themselves registered as "Norfolk".  An application
> for a town name was expensive, and to get the name corrected
> back to what they wanted would require that they go through
> the process again.  So they decided to accept the spelling
> of "Norfolk", but they would continue to pronounce it as it
> was supposed to be: "Norfork".  This dichotomy between the
> written and the spoken forms of the name has continued down
> to the present day.
>
> Rory
>