"Language," the philosopher and poet Ralph Waldo Emerson once said, "Is fossil poetry." In the same spirit, place-names are fossil history. Moments of the past frozen in time. The names that dot the map of the United States--at last count they number more than three million--reveal much about the nation's development. They record forgotten episodes, commemorate passing moments and great events alike, and chronicle the movement of peoples and generation over hundreds, even thousands of years.
Our oldest place-names are, of course, American Indian in origin--as foreign visitors note when puzzling out pronunciations, trying to make linguistic sense out of words like Mattapoiset, Passamaquody, and Tukanikavits; no mainland state lacks such names, which long precede the Europeans' arrival. In the East, we have Schenectady, New York, an Algonquian name meaning "forested hill," and Okeefenokee, Florida, "shaking water" in Muskogean, so called for the hundreds of quicksand pools that dot the huge lake's swampy shore. In the Midwest and the Great Plains states, the names of great tribes, most meaning "the people," resound: Ogallala, Cheyenne, Dakota, Shoshone, Sioux, Nebraska, Iowa, and Arkansas. The West has its share, too, from Tucumcari, New Mexico, a Comanche word for "place of ambush," to Walla Walla, Washington, a Nez Perce name meaning "swift Small River."
European imprints
When Europeans arrived in the Americas to stay five hundred years ago, they brought familiar things with them: plows, guns, seeds, and customs. They brought their languages, their religions, their literatures. And they brought names to remind them of the lands they had left behind, anchoring themselves in their pasts in the face of an unknown world.
Over a period of three hundred years, the Spanish planted names from St. Augustine, Florida, westward to San Francisco, California, giving us pleasant-sounding points on the map like Punto Lobos (wolves' point), California; Palacios (palaces), Texas; and La Junta (the junction), Colorado. The state where I live carries hundreds of Spanish place-names, but scholars still dispute the origins of the word Arizona. According to some, it combines the Spanish words arida and zona, "arid zone"; others attribute the name to the O'odham words ali and shonak, "the place of the little spring"; and still others trace the name to the Basque arizonac, a term that cropped up in an old mining claim and that is thought to mean "place of the oaks." The historian Herbert Bancroft even suggested, quite seriously, that the shape
...
Read Full Article
Look for this article in Ask.com
|
