-by (Norse suffix for 'settlement') vs. -bury (corruption of Old English for 'castle') lets you pretty nicely draw out the borders of the historic Danelaw i.e. the area where the Norse Vikings settled:
As I said in another comment, just bear in mind the possibility that the map of 878 England from the 19th century could well be based upon the same evidence. Although it is significant that the names survive and show clear boundaries, it may well be a lot less significant that a modern map and a 19th century map show the same boundaries.
Quite a lot of what is now Scotland was Norse for a long time - the most obvious name being "Sutherland" (Suðrland) which is extreme north west of the island of Britain:
Thanks to this I found the source data which is really cool: https://osdatahub.os.uk/downloads/open/OpenNames - you can download a zip file full of CSVs with a huge number of geographic names (with British National Grid (EPSG:27700) coordinates).
You can do the same with early Saxons and the '-ing' suffix. It is concentrated towards the south east. Variants such as '-ington' and '-ingham' came later incorporating wider influences.
Just needs a pronunciation guide now. British place names are impossible to pronounce even for native British English speakers because they are often not said how they are written and only people within a 15 mile radius will know the right way.
Bicester is another canonical example. Pronounced like "Mister" with a "B" in place of the "M". I don't think a single native English speaker would correctly pronounce Bicester on their first attempt.
The elision of the 'e' in -cester placenames so that the 'c' and 's' have a single sound is reasonably common e.g. Leicester, Gloucester, Worcester, Towcester, Bicester. So English natives should have a reasonable chance of getting the pronunciation of a previously unseen example correct.
Some switch around the "s" and "sh" sounds, so it is pronounced roughly like "shtratsiatella". "st" at the beginning of a word is pronounced as "sht" in German.
Godmanchester in Cambridgeshire, although now pronunced by most people as 'God-Man-Chest-Er', used to be pronounced (and may still be by some locals) as Gumster.
All descending from the Latin "castrum", which means "fort". So if a placename has one of those suffixes, chances are high that it was a Roman settlement.
A far from trivial task, given we can't agree on (for “can't agree on”, read “actually have arguments about”) the pronunciation of simple baked products.
It is neither scone nor scone you fools. Both are wrong, and it should in fact be pronounced “scone”.
US pronunciation is (from the point of view of a western european) very very wild sometimes. If you ask anyone who lives closer to Paris than America how to pronounce the university of Notre Dame you're going to get a very different answer to someone who's an alumnus (something like Nodur Dayme?).
The name of the whole of Illinois is an American-English mispronunciation of a French mispronunciation of a Native American word which is/was something like irenwe·wa.
TIL Britain is like Washington State. Try getting anyone from east of the Cascades to pronounce Sequim, Snoqualmie, Snohomish, Puyallup, or Cle Elum correctly.
There can also be cases where nobody in the area actually uses anything close to the "official" name - e.g. Fraserburgh being known as "The Broch" or Aberchirder as "Foggie", Gardenstown as "Gamrie"...
NB Been a while since I lived in an adjacent area, things may have changed...
But you're OK with 50 states and a district being one country?
Also I'm curious if you're familiar with any history of the islands of Ireland and Great Britain? If not, I recommend reading up - save you accusing any country of just being unwise, or whatever it is you are attempting to convey with "an event horizon that conventional wisdom slips over"
"Four countries is one country" is very different from "50 states is one country".
For one, Northern Ireland is variously described as a country, province or region despite (sometimes) having its own government and semi-independent legal system.
Wales has its own language and parliament, but shares a legal system (but not all laws) with England.
Scotland has its own legal system and is supposed to be the equal counter-party to {England {which included Wales}} in the name "United Kingdom of …".
England doesn't have an independent parliament of its own, "just" (scare-quotes needed) the one for the whole UK.
The history may have led to the status quo, but it's fair and reasonable to say the status quo is bonkers.
This discussion reminds of when a junior joins a team on an old monolith and after 3 days claims everything a mess! It's bonkers! How can you work like this! I could rewrite this perfectly in 3 months! Is it "bonkers" if it's generating $1bn in revenue?
UK GDP is $3tn :D
> "Four countries is one country" is very different from "50 states is one country".
I don't think you made a very compelling argument. Both are made of constituent parts. Both are "united" in various ways. States have their own constitutions, laws etc. It's messy. Fewer issues around language, I grant that.
> I don't think you made a very compelling argument
Fair enough.
"Four countries is one country" has the same level of abstraction; "50 states is one country" (or in reverse, the EU can be seen as "27 countries one state" if you squint and are a bit vague with definitions) is different kinds of abstraction.
Pizza is a possible pizza topping, but it's also weird.
I like the French now tradition of a full reboot every now and then. Cruft is qaint, but century after century or so parts become a burden. Forcing yourself to decide what to keep and what to toss is good.
And the obvious way to solve this would be to rename it to Zürichderry, which will make everyone equally unhappy and angry, and is therefore the fairest solution.
No it's not. W and y are vowels in Welsh (y can also be a consonant sometimes but I think only in words loaned from English). In Welsh the letter w stands for a sound something like the double o in the English word book.
I get a giggle every time I hear an American talk about "Fort Belvoir" because in the English Vale of Belvoir, under Belvoir Castle, it is pronounced "Beaver" not "Bel-Voir"
A complaint typically mad by Americans. Amusingly the person who recently took issue with the matter in my (physical) presence came from a place in Arkansas which from then on I've deliberately pronounced ahh-can-sas.
The issue is more common in countries old enough to have not made up most of their place names (or unimaginatively stolen them from elsewhere, looking at you New York, Boston, Paris, etc.!) in recent centuries, so there has been a lot more evolution (or in some cases outright replacement due to invasions & politics) in language pronunciation and/or spelling since those names were first coined, but the young whipper-snappers like the US are far from immune to the problem.
Very interesting tool! My Yorkshire grandfather would often say "kirk" instead of "church", which I always thought was more of a Scottish word. Doing a place name comparison of those words shows a fairly clear division of north and south - https://placenames.rtwilson.com/#W3sidGV4dCI6ImtpcmsiLCJjb2x...
In the UK the word comes from Norse, via the Viking Invasion not directly from anything Germanic (other than that Germanic and Norse share some stuff).
There's a long list comparing cognates in various Scandinavian languages here. I can't vouch for the Scots, but the Norwegian looks mostly accurate (though labelling Norwegian as Norse is weird - maybe it's a Scots thing, but the two are distinct languages). Interestingly it is almost "too strict" in some cases. E.g. Scots "efter" (English "after") is generally "etter" in modern Norwegian, but "efter" is an older form, from the Danish, and still in use though more so in particularly conservative older spoken Norwegian and some dialects.
I'm not sure what they meant, but "k" in some Germanic languages are pronounced with a sound similar to German "ch" in some contexts.
E.g Norwegian "kirke" and German "Kirche" has almost the same sounds expect the order of the "k" and "ch" sounds are reversed:
Norwegian "kirke" is IPA /çɪrkə/ vs German "Kirche", IPA: /ˈkɪʁçə/
Notably, this is not the case for either Scots "kirk" (/kɪɾk/) or English "church" (which is /t͡ʃɜːt͡ʃ/)
Interestingly, the words for church in these languages all comes from Byzantine Greek via Proto-West Germanic, and English is the odd one out (as usual-ish) of the Germanic languages by having gone to "cirice" in Old English while all the other Germanic languages retained k's, and usually at least one "k" sound as well, and even in cases like German where one of the k's has become a "ch", the "ch" sound is the IPA /ç/ that is often spelled "k" in other Germanic languages.
The first "k" in Norwegian "kirke" (Swedish "kyrka") and "ch" in German "Kirche" are entirely different sounds (with exception(s), one German dialect comes to mind). The "k" in "kirke" is somewhere between German "sch" and "ch" but is neither really, the sound doesn't exist in [almost all] German [dialects].
Source: My native tongue is German and I've lived in Scandinavia for over a decade.
[Sorry for the dissertation; I needed to look some of these up because I wanted to make sure I wasn't messing it up, and I fell down a rabbit hole - it's very fascinating to look at the subtle differences here; at least it is to me, because it also helps my own pronunciation]
It's not nearly that simple. I won't say you're wrong, because you might very well - even probably - be right for some (many even) pairs of German and Scandinavian dialects. But the Scandinavian languages are not interchangeable in this respect, including the Norwegian dialects.
The "clear" ch- start is the "norm" for Bokmål in Norwegian, with the caveat that there is no official Norwegian pronunciation, but in Nynorsk, the IPA used by Wiktionary is /²çʏrçɑ/ (compare /çɪrkə/ for Bokmål) - again with the caveat that there is no official pronunciation and this is a "middle of the road" sort of choice. This is the voiceless palatal fricative, and it's a fairly rare sound and one that Norwegian definitely has in common with German, but the precise variant might not match in all German dialects with all Norwegian dialects.
In Swedish you don't use the voiceless palatal fricative (IPA /ç/ - that's the ch) at all in kyrka - instead /²ɕʏrka/ or /²ɕørka/. Finnish Swedish /²tɕʏrka/ - I don't know whether they use it in any other words. Danish doesn't get even close for kirke (IPA [ˈkʰiɐ̯ɡ̊ə]). So first of all, lets discount those, as I wrote about Norwegian, and while the pronunciation is certainly mutually intelligible it uses different sounds than both German and Norwegian for this example.
I'm also going to mostly ignore Nynorsk, which is also different, and to infuriate any Nynorsk speakers who come across this, when I write "Norwegian", assume bokmål, or to make it difficult "the dialects spoken where Bokmål is the main written language" as technically Bokmål is the written language.
But even within the set of those speakers, you'll find a range going from near Nynorsk to near Swedish or near-ish - but not quite as near - Danish (at least not in pronunciation; in terms of vocabulary we're often nearer Danish than Swedish), with variants in between.
I'm native Norwegian , and I speak German, and it'll sound perfectly fine in Norwegian if you use the "ch" from Kirche at the start of "kirke" - at least the German dialects I'm used with. It will match plenty of dialects, but it might not match specifically your Scandinavian language or dialect. In mine moving towards German "sch" would be very out of place.
I checked some German videos just make sure I wasn't imagining things or have been mispronouncing ch/sch all these years, but the ones I found used a "ch" sound that's perfectly fine at the start of "kirke". You might be pickier than I am with respect that what is the exact same sound, but to me at least, there's a very distinct different position of the tip of your tongue for German "ch" and "sch", and I struggle to even form the word "kirke" if I start close to the "sch" position.
BUT, the drift between the "ch" (voiceless palatal fricative) and the "rs" in "norsk" or "skj" in "skjønn", which in Norwegian is the voiceless retroflex fricative, and that certainly can sound like something in between German ch and "such" but would - as you describe it - be neither, is an ongoing "problem" in Norwegian (that it's "retroflex" means it's pronounced by curling the tongue up like the alveolar fricative used in German "schone" or the palato-alveolar "sch" in fleisch - but not with the tongue lifted towards the hard palate like in both the German "sch" variants; you can shift between those sounds by holding the tip of the tongue in the same position and shifting the back of your tongue up/down - if you speak Norwegian, try switching between "schone" and "skjønn" - your tongue should typically lift at least a tiny bit when pronouncing "schone" and drop for "skjønn" but the difference can be very minor depending on dialect)
My mother used to work in nurseries, and I remember her despairing over the shift towards the retroflex (not in those words...) going back to my own childhood in the early 1980's, as it sounds awful to many of us. She spoke of it as something new the kids were doing and that they struggled to speak "properly", but I'm not convinced it was actually a new thing.
Those sounds are historically very distinct in Norwegian but Norwegian children struggle with separating them. E.g. "kjøtt" is the archetypical example of a word that "should be" pronounced with firmly palatal "ch" (IPA /çœt/) but that people tend to despair over how the pronunciation is drifting towards the retroflex (e.g. closer to "skjøtt") because the mis-pronunciation has become more and more prevalent, and that adults would get really annoyed when kids got wrong.
It's a less pronounced and common "error" with "kirke", but I certainly wouldn't be surprised if it's creeping into that as well in some dialects, so again, to be clear I'm not saying you're wrong; I'm sure you're right for some/your dialect. Germanic/Scandinavian dialects are just infuriatingly diverse.
Interestingly enough when I was growing up in a small Scottish village (~1000 people) it was the Church of Scotland that was referred to as the "kirk" - the other 5 or so "churches" weren't referred to as kirks.
Shame it doesn't do regexes so you can control for position in word.
But a search for thorpe (Scunthorpe, Mablethorpe, Cleethorpes, farmstead) vs a search for ney (Athelney, Muchelney, Thorney, island) will give you a feel for the influence of Anglo-Saxon vs Old Norse.
Annoyingly I don't think this is working with NI, I tried starts with Bally (which there's a lot of in NI, ballymena, ballymacash, ballycastle etc) and I only got a couple in Scottland
The combination of the giant hand cursor with the hot spot underneath in the middle so you can't see what the palm is "pointing" to, plus the teenie tiny little dot targets, plus the small pop-up tooltip text that the cursor partially covers up, sure makes it hard and frustrating to use! Zooming in doesn't help, the tiny dots stay small.
Why aren't more user interface designers aware of Fitts' Law, and why do some seem to violate it on purpose?
It's from an Old English toponym, and those are sometimes quite variable across the country; for example locally in Sheffield any steep hillsides are named 'cliffe' e.g. Attercliffe, Brincliffe.
https://placenames.rtwilson.com/#W3sidGV4dCI6ImJ5IiwiY29sb3I...
Compare against this map: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:England_878.svg
The Danelaw ceased to politically exist over a thousand years ago so that's pretty impressive.