 Welcome to the Endless None. You may have noticed recently that there haven't been any main videos, any big videos, and the reason for that is that I've been traveling. First of all, in June I went to VidCon and in particular participated in EduCon, a special one-day session of workshops and so forth for specifically creators of educational content for YouTube, and that was really productive and hopefully there will be some suggestions that I've taken away from that that can improve our videos. The second trip that I took with the family, this was a vacation, not a working trip, was to Iceland and England. But of course, I can't leave etymology completely behind, so along the way I decided to talk about the etymologies of the place names that we visited, and so that's what today's video is all about. So it'll be a bunch of clips taken from traveling with me talking about the place names that we were at and a little bit about those places. Word of warning, of course, since this was taken on the go, the sound quality varies from time to time. Most of it was filmed outside, so there was, you know, outside noises and wind and so forth. Hopefully it's not too bad though. And of course, it was just done sort of on the spur of the moment. It wasn't scripted or anything like that. But hopefully you will enjoy hearing about these place names. Some of them, you know, are very well-known places, but some of them are also out-of-the-way places that we happen to visit, so they may be quite new to you. But I think they're all quite interesting. If you want to hear more about these trips and things that we saw along the way and things that we learned, check out our podcast, which will be going up towards the end of August. So of course our journey started at home here in Sudbury, Sudbury, Ontario, Canada. There wasn't really much here before European colonization. I was only sparsely populated by the Ojibwe people, but not a major centre as far as I know. However, when Canada was building the Transcontinental Railway, they discovered that Sudbury was a location containing nickel ore, and so it's because of that, that a town really grew up in the area. The name Sudbury obviously comes from the name of a city in back in Europe. So in this case it was Sudbury in England in the county of Suffolk, which was a small market town, not particularly well known. However, it happened to be the home of the wife of the superintendent of that stretch of the Transcontinental Railway. Her name was Caroline, his name James Worthington, and so he selected that name I guess in honour of his wife. The British name Sudbury is pretty straightforward, so the Sud part means south, from Old English soothe, and the second element, burry, comes from the word for a fortification and is a common place name element in many British place names, some of which we're going to see a little later on in our trip. So the first stop on our trip was Toronto, since it's much cheaper to fly out of Toronto than Sudbury. So we drove down to Toronto, we spent part of a day there looking at an aquarium and then flew from there. The name Toronto is an interesting one as you may well guess. It comes from an indigenous language, though its precise source and meaning are uncertain. The Huron people had been living in the area, but a little later on as they moved away the Iroquois moved in. It might therefore come from Huron meaning meaning place, or it might come from Iroquois meaning wood in the water, or some other source that we don't know. Once the British colonizers arrived in the region, the British Lord Dorchester arranged for the purchase of these lands in 1787 from the Mississaugas, and he intended it to be named Toronto. However, the Lieutenant Governor of Upper Canada at the time, John Simcoe, didn't like the use of indigenous place names, and so he was set on renaming it York. John Simcoe specifically chose the name York, not just after the city, but in fact after the Duke of York, who was Frederick, Duke of York and Albany, the second son of George III, and we'll hear more about that etymology a little later on in our trip. It only stayed with that name for a little while, though the people living there decided they wanted to change the name back after Simcoe was gone, and so it was renamed Toronto going forward. However, that name York still survives in a number of regional elements like North York, which was originally a separate city just north of Toronto, now just a region of the mega city of Toronto, and the various nicknames for the city. Sometimes it's called Yorktown, there's the neighborhood Yorkville, so there's a number of different references to that earlier name. By the way, Simcoe, in his renaming insistence, decided to change the name of the River Toronto to Humber, after the famous river in the north of England, separating what was north of the Humber, Northumbria, or Northumberland, from the regions further south, and that name has stuck. It's still known as Humber. So, welcome to Reykjavík, Iceland. This is the first stop on our little vacation, and I'm here my first day in Reykjavík, so I thought I'd tell you about the origin of the name Reykjavík. This is a pretty well known one, so you may have heard it already. It means literally Bay of Smoke, the first part Reykjavík means smoke, and Vík means a bay or cove or inlet, something like that. So the name obviously refers to the volcanic steam that is produced here in Reykjavík. It's well known for it. So that first element, Reykjavík, is cognate with rík, English word rík, and the second element may be cognate with the first part of the word viking, depending on which etymology you prefer for the word viking. So viking either means refers to the fact that they came out of these bays, these fjords, unless you choose to go with the other etymology for viking, the vike part coming from Latin vikus, meaning a settlement. So there's ongoing debate as to which of those etymologies is the right one, but in any case it seems like the vike part in Reykjavík and viking may also be cognate with the the wick suffix in a lot of British place names. So we'll be looking at a few of those a little later on when we end up in England and look at some of those place names. Today's place name is geysir, from which we get the word geyser. In fact, geysir is the very first geyser. All other geysers around the world are named after this one hot spring in Iceland, located in Haukdallar near Reykjavík. So the word geysir in Icelandic means literally gusher from geysa to gush, and it comes from a Proto-Indo-European root that means to pour, and is thus cognate with words such as English gush as well as gut, funnel, fusion, and refund. Next we have the place name gofos, a waterfall in Iceland, and the name literally means golden waterfall. Gol means gold, it's cognate with English gold as well as the English word yellow comes from a Proto-Indo-European root that means to shine, and fos comes from a Proto-Indo-European root that means to spray or splatter. Fos means waterfall in Icelandic, but the Proto-Indo-European root pers means to splatter or spray. Next we have the place name Thingvillir. Thingvillir is a national park in Iceland and is the location of the very first parliament in Iceland. It's also the site of the join between the North American tectonic plate and the European tectonic plate, and they are gradually drifting apart and new land is being created as the volcanic material comes up from the ground. The name Thingvillir has two parts to it. So the first part Thing refers to the fact that it was a meeting place for the parliament. So a parliamentary or an assembly of any kind is known in Icelandic as Thing and originally Thing meant that too in English. The root that it comes from the Proto-Indo-European root and the Germanic after it, the word originally meant stretch and it came to mean a stretch of time and from that it came to mean the sort of appointed time for a meeting. Hence it's meaning of assembly. The second part of the word, Villir, originally meant a forest, a wooded area and it comes into English as Wold, which we'll see a little later on in an English place name, but it eventually oddly enough came to refer to an area that is sort of an open land. So that's where the the Villir part comes to really mean something more like a field or something like that in Icelandic. Thingvillir is in particular the location in which the famous Law Rock is located. This is where during the All Thing, the General Assembly, the Law Speaker would stand upon a particular rocky outcrop and read the laws or speak out the laws. And in Icelandic the word for Law Rock is Lübberg, literally Law Rock. When we arrived in England, we flew into London and we took some footage there but forgot to actually record the etymology itself, so I'm doing it now that I'm home. This name is recorded as far back as Roman times when Britain was a province of the Roman Empire and so in Latin it was known as Londonium. But of course the name doesn't come originally from Latin, it comes from a Celtic source that we're not exactly sure what and what it originally meant. There's actually a lot of debate on this. So one theory is that it means something like place of the navigable river or unfortable river, so in reference to that point of the Thames which runs through London. So at that point the Thames is quite deep, therefore you can't cross it, you can't fort it, but it is navigable by relatively large boats. So that's one theory of what the Celtic root of that name might be. Another theory is that it might be an eponym, so therefore named after someone named Londonos, so place belonging to Londonos, that personal name might come from a word that longed that means wild. It may even be a pre-Celtic source that gives us the name and I believe that's where the affordable river idea comes from. So today I'm in Leicester. The city name Leicester has two elements to it. The second part comes from the word Chester which you find at the end of lots of city names in England and that word comes from Latin castrum meaning a field or camp. Ultimately it may come from a Indo-European root that means to cut, so it's a sort of cut-off area. The first part of the place named Leicester seems to refer to a tribal name in Latin. It was the Ligore. It seems to come from the name of a river, so they were the the people who lived near the Ligore river and that river name is also preserved in a nearby river, the Lera river. According to Geoffrey Monmouth that name is connected to King Lair, the legendary Celtic king, and it possibly goes back to the same Proto-Indo-European root that gives the river name Loire in France. So that root means to lay or lie, the idea probably referring to sediment, hence a river name. So in some it means the camp of the Ligore people, the people who live near this river. The river name ultimately coming from a reference to the sediment that is deposited by the river, I suppose. So today we're in Nottingham. Specifically I'm standing in front of Nottingham Castle, which is unfortunately closed at the moment for restoration, but I thought I'd talk about the name Nottingham anyway. So the site before it became known as Nottingham it was already a Celtic site. So in Brithonic, and I'm going to mispronounce this name and I apologize for that, it was known as Tigro Cobauk, I think, which means city of caves and this is demonstrated by the fact that the site that Nottingham Castle is built on is riddled with caves underneath it. After the arrival of the Anglo-Saxons the place was taken over by someone named Snot, hence the current name of the site. So it was originally Snottingham. So Snotting means the people of Snot, so his tribal group or family group, and the ham part is cognate with home. So the home of the Snottings, the home of Snot's family or Snot's tribe, we could say. Eventually after the Norman conquest the S was dropped off the beginning of Snottingham and it transformed into its current form, Nottingham. So but you can still remember that this is the place that's not owned. So here I am in Lechleid on Thames. It's a village in the Cotswolds. The village sits next to a very upper part of the Thames, and the town's name means probably River Crossing near the River Leech. So the River Leech is a tributary to the Thames, and the River Leech gets its name from an Old English word latch. That means a boggy stream, and is cognate with the word leak, as in water leaking. The second part of the name Lechleid comes from Old English Yalad, which means a way, a course, or a going, and is cognate with English load. And Lechleid is the highest point in the Thames that is navigable by a relatively large sized boat or laden boat. So in times past goods would be loaded here and shipped down to London. The Cotswolds is a bit of an uncertain etymology, at least in terms of the first part of the name. It might be a personal name, an Old English personal name Cod, so it's Codswold, or it might come from a word that was used to refer to sheep. Ultimately from a word that means a little hut or cottage that could be used to keep the sheep in, and it would therefore be related to the word cottage. Wold, or an Old English wild, means a forest or wooded area, and it ultimately is related to the second element of Thingvillier, where we were before, in Iceland. So originally that the protogermanic root referred to a wooded area, and then in Norse it came instead to refer to more of an open valley or meadow kind of area, but in Old English it continued to refer to a forest or treed area. So it either means Cod's forest or it means sheep forest, I suppose. The town Sirencester in the Cotswolds was originally known in Roman times as Corinium. The name seems to have come from a Celtic name. Corin is cognate with churn, the Celtic name of nearby river, but its ultimate meaning is unknown. This, during Old English times, was then suffixed with the common place name, element Cester or Chester, which ultimately comes from Latin meaning a town, a fortified place, and the first part developed into Siren, and so it's now known as Sirencester. So here I am far upstream on the River Thames, the famous river in England, which runs all the way from the Cotswolds through London and out to the Channel. So I thought I'd talk about the name Thames itself. This is somewhat of a disputed etymology, this may not be much of a surprise to hear. It had previously been called Thamesis in Latin, named as far back as 51 BC. So the the TH at the beginning is not etymological, it was added in later, but still pronounced with just a hard T sound. So it either comes from a Celtic root, tam, which means dark, so the the dark one, the dark river, something like that, or it comes from a pre-Celtic root, ta, that means something like to melt or flow turbidly. And by the way, in Oxfordshire, it is also known as Isis. So today I'm in Oxford, the location of Oxford University, which you can see some of behind me, with its many very old medieval buildings. The name is pretty straightforward. It means the place where oxen ford the river, cross over the river. So it's a it's a point where it's possible to lead your oxes across the river. So the first part of that ox comes from the Old English word oxa, meaning ox, probably ultimately from a Proto-Indo-European root. That means wet or to sprinkle. So literally then an ox is a bespringler, an animal that sprinkles. The second part of Oxford, ford, comes from an Old English word ford, which ultimately comes from Proto-Indo-European root pair. That means to lead across or go across or something like that. I'm not actually in Yorkshire at the moment, but we'll show some pictures from when we were. But in any case, the the moors behind me may be reminiscent of the landscape of Yorkshire. Anyways, we're not far from there. The name Yorkshire is actually quite a complex part. So the Shire part comes from Old English Sheer, referring to an administrative region. It possibly is connected to a Latin word for any care. But the York part is the really interesting part. It was originally known in Latin as a boracum, a Latinization of a Celtic name, possibly. So in that case it would be Iborus's place, Iborus's form, or something like that. Or possibly it's related to the word U as in U-tree. So it therefore means sort of the place and the place built with U-trees, I suppose. After the Anglo-Saxons invaded, they thought that Latinized Celtic place name Iboracum sounded a bit like a native Anglo-Saxon word, A-O-4, meaning wild boar. And so they kind of reinterpreted the name as alphawick, or alphawitch, which would therefore mean something like a wild boar farm. So the wick or which part of that is a Germanic word, that possibly comes from, is borrowed from Latin vicus, meaning village, and may go back to a proto-Indo-European root. That means clan. Now after, this is the story of many invasions, after the north of England was invaded by the Vikings, they again sort of reinterpreted the name somewhat and they replaced that English place name element weak with the Norse word vique, as in Reykjavík, which means bay, even though the town York was not any more close to a bay, but nevertheless it sort of sounded similar enough that they made that transition. And the first part, A-O-4, became simply your, so they called it Jorvik during the time of the Danelaw, and eventually that got contracted to simply York. So today I'm in Lancashire, the name Lancashire is a sort of contraction of Lancastershire, so the first part of that it comes from a Celtic river name, the Celtic river name moon that may mean healthy or pure, the Caster part as we've seen before from Latin meaning camp, and the Shire part which goes back to Old English, ultimately from a proto-Germanic word that refers to an administrative region, but it possibly has been connected with Latin cura, so meaning care. So we're currently visiting in Burry, we're actually a little bit outside of the town at the moment. Burry is a pretty straightforward one, it simply means a fortified place, it comes from a Germanic root, Old English Burr, and that Burry element occurs at the end of many place names in England like Canterbury or anything with a burrow on the end, that's where that comes from. It comes ultimately from a root that means high, so you can imagine a sort of fortification high up on a hill or something like that. So we visited Manchester obviously, we're not in the city right now, the name Manchester, we've seen that second part, the Chester part a number of times already, referring to a Roman fortified place. The man part is from a Celtic source obviously, the meaning is uncertain, but it quite possibly comes from a Celtic word that means breast in reference to the hills, so breast-shaped hills, so I suppose therefore that would mean Manchester means breast hill fortified place. And one more we forgot to film while in England was Liverpool. Liverpool comes from Old English elements that basically means pool that is thick with mud or weeds, so the pool part is fairly obvious, the liver part is indeed related to liver the organ, but in a different sense it meant sort of thick or coagulated, so it's obviously connected to the idea of the liver, the organ and the body, the word also happened to be used to mean a clot of blood, and it goes back to a proto-Indo-European root, lape, that means to stick or adhere or fat, and so hence this idea of being kind of thick or clogged up, it therefore referred to the, I guess the Mersey, thick with mud or something like that or weeds. There is another theory about the etymology that it came from something more like elder pool in reference to eels, so a pool filled with eels, but I think the consensus now anyways is that it is this idea of muddy water. So the people from Liverpool are often referred to as liver pudleons, so this is a kind of humorous joke on the name, pool being replaced with puddle. Also the people from Liverpool are known as scousers or their dialect of English as scouse. This comes from an aim for a type of stew, the sort of local stew, the local dish, and so again this is kind of humorously referred to the people and the way they speak. Well here I am in Filey, you can see the ocean behind me, and it is called Filey because of that large promontory you also see behind me. Filey comes from Old English fiefel, meaning sea monster, and the the e part of Filey comes from Old English a, or ea, which is the first element of island. There is another possible etymology that it comes from Old English fief, meaning five, and la, meaning clearing, so five clearings, but I kind of like the sea monster promontory, and it does kind of look like a sea monster if you look at it. Thanks for watching, and coming along virtually on our vacation to Iceland and England. If you want to hear more about these trips and the things that we did and learned, check out our next podcast episode coming out late August. Main videos will return very soon, there'll be another video at later in the month, and lots more to come through the fall and beyond. Bye for now!