Back to the Features! Direction, Distance, Disposition, and Orientation in the Evolution of Land and Sea Placenames
ISBN 978-85-88783-11-9
Authors
1Ferland, Y.
1UNIVERSITÉ LAVAL Email: yaivesferland@gmail.com
Abstract
As geospatial objects, place-names evolve with other aspects and attributes of the places they name and can be displaced, enlarged, partitioned, assembled, transplanted, and even translated from a distant external point of view. All those circumstances imply centrality, scale hierarchy, direction, orientation, and relative disposition. For natural or political reasons, that concerns different results on endonyms or exonyms as the direction and orientation are currently expressed by attributes in compound names, more frequently as prefixes in many Indo-European languages. Although the expression of such geospatial relations is linguistics, most toponyms are determined by the geographical features they refer to, and their relative composition is detailed and explained (or not, in confusing situation) by looking at the map. If the case is about elevation in valley or mountainous parts of a region, terms like upper-, mid-, and lower-/neder- are empirical qualities added to the specific denomination of this land. Relative distance from a powerful center like Ancient Rome was expressed by Latin cis-/cit- (nearer) in opposition to trans-/ult- (other side, further), or relative size or importance by major- versus minor-; inner- and outer- work the same. Still today, that may be combined with cardinal directions to call indefinite regions without a specific name like: Near-East, Midwest, Far-North/Grand-Nord (FR), Deep-South (!), Extrême-Orient (FR), Nordeste (PT), or Northwest Passage. Centrality can move from a self-reflexive dominant realm (e.g., from the “civilized” Western Europe) to descriptive of a larger space within most important regions or empires, without being at their core: e.g., Central Asia (here a specific), République Centrafricaine (FR). Confusion may arise where direction is given respective to a place with oriented name: the southern (part of) North Dakota is not the same place as at the South (outside) of North Dakota. Generic terms may express nuances in feature composition like bay and gulf, or three terms used for different forms of archipelago in Japanese: guntō, rettō and shotō (JP). All these relative situations are simple and easy examples of direction, disposition, and orientation appearing in vernacular placenames since millennia. From a methodological perspective, more interesting are situations inherited since the Age of Discovery. Instead of claiming for an encompassing toponymic theory, one must speak of denominative trends that can set light on some problems and provide positive arguments to settle them. First, European explorers and conquerors imported city, province, or country names from the Old Continent into the New Worlds, by adding this very quality: Nueva Granada (ES), Nieuw Amsterdam (NL), Nouvelle-Orléans (FR), Nova Scotia (LA), New South Wales (EN). Hence direction was used directly to coin a new continent/country name: Australia. Second, few larger waterbodies bear cardinal direction on their name, as: North Sea, Ostsee (DE)/Baltic Sea, Bassin Levantin (FR) (eastern Mediterranean Sea), East and South China Seas, or so-called Southern Ocean. Third, from these examples, an orientation argument may be stated for maritime naming. The rationale for North Sea (at the East of England, West of Denmark, South of Norway) is not the North direction from the whole Europe, but the sea to sail through North. Most of these maritime names indicate the destination from some center origin where they were given: a land (Norway), a people (Baltic), a shore (Persian), the end of a bay or gulf (Bengal), an island (Java), an archipelago (the Philippines), or the other side of a strait (Mozambique). Finally, one can trace orientation of cultural, political, or commercial influences in transmission or diffusion of groups of similar and stable exonyms along geographical trajectories over centuries, from places to places toward farther countries while local endonyms evolved to present placenames of good old places.
Keywords
Toponymic methodology; Toponym direction/orientation; Evolution of feature names