this post was submitted on 12 Dec 2024
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Lord Of The Rings Memes
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Tolkien studied languages, so he would've understood and probably appreciated how often things are named purely based on what they do or their immediate aesthetic values. Language is all about communication after all. Sometimes that necessitates complexity, but it should always be as simple as possible without sacrificing nuance.
the vast majority of place names irl are just objective descriptors, optionally with that having been twisted through time.
Exeter means "castle on the river exe", starting as "esceancaster"; Aberdeen means "mouth of the river dee"; Amsterdam means "dam in the amstel"; Stockholm means roughly "log islet" as it started on the tiny central island which they put logs around.
And of course in germanic areas there's the very common "burg/borg", which just means that the place has a castle/fortification.