Catching up on blog posts from my holiday I saw the cover for a book named Northworld: Vengeance on Good Show Sir (a blog devoted to “only the worst sci-fi/fantasy book covers” — and indeed, this one is awful). “Northworld,” I thought to myself, “what kind of nonsense is that?” According to one commentator the world was discovered by “a guy named North”, which doesn’t improve matters much. But then I remembered about living in glass houses and casting first stones: I am hardly in a position to criticise others on the originality of their placenames.

I come from New Zealand, a country that was named after the Dutch province of Zeeland. “Zeeland” literally means “sea country”, a not particularly original title for either the Dutch coastal area or the islands in the south of the Pacific. A dull placename warmed over, but it gets worse.

New Zealand is made up of two main islands, which have names suggesting they were invented by a teenager briefly inspired by Tolkien’s world-building but who became distracted before finishing the roughing-out stage of mapmaking. (Perhaps our would-be cartographer was named Stewart: the next largest island is Stewart Island, which always gets forgotten when discussing New Zealand geography — except, presumably, by the 400-odd people who live there.) The big two are the North Island and the South Island (correct usage includes the article): names which one imagines were pencilled in at some point early in New Zealand’s European history and which inexplicably were not replaced before general use went over them in ink.

Even more inexplicably, there are perfectly good Maori alternatives for these names, which could have replaced these awkward relics decades ago but somehow never have. The South Island is Te Wai Pounamu which means “the water(s) of greenstone” (somewhat oddly, since greenstone is not geologically associated with water; apparently the name descends from the more sensible Te Wāhi Pounamu, meaning the place of greenstone). The North Island is Te Ika-a-Māui, Maui’s fish,1 from a legend that relates how the folk hero Maui fished up the island (all 113,729 square kilometres of it) using a hook made of his grandmother’s jawbone and baited with blood from his own nose. These names are conscientiously included in official publications, since New Zealand is nominally bilingual, but for everyday matters we’re stuck with “up North” and “down South”.

Unfortunately it doesn’t end there. The West Coast (of the South Island) is famous for its stormy weather and high rainfall and boasts a town called Westport; you may have seen the East Coast (this time of the North Island, and including East Cape) in the film Whale Rider. Westland is a West Coast district (confusingly Westport is not in Westland, although it is on the West Coast), while Southland is both an “administrative region” (like the West Coast) and a district within that region (like Westland).2 There is even a World Heritage Area known as South Westland.

Of the European placenames in New Zealand that you can’t navigate by, the vast majority are reheated servings of Britain. Wellington the capital is named for Wellington the general, Nelson city for Admiral Nelson, and so on. Showing slightly more originality, Dunedin (where I studied for my first degree) is the Scots Gaelic for Edinburgh (I suspect both to mean Edin-town, but thankfully “Edin” doesn’t seem to be a compass direction or a military gentleman). After this promising beginning, though, they folded, lifting enormous numbers of streetnames wholesale from the Scottish capital: George Street and Great King Street, Princes Street, Royal Terrace, Duke Street, and on down the feudal hierarchy (of limited relevance in our far-off colony, but all the more preciously commemorated for that fact); I’ve lived on Elm Row and Dundas Street, and finding the latter in Edinburgh on Google maps turns up (among many other familiar names) the agreeable juxtaposition of Cumberland and Northumberland as well.

The peninsula protecting Dunedin’s harbour is known as “The Peninsula”.

Part of the problem in New Zealand is of course colonisation. Pakeha (non-Maori) arrived awfully recently in New Zealand, and set about making themselves feel at home by ignoring the natives and naming everything after what they held dear (admirals and generals, the royal family, and points of the compass; this might tell you something about British imperial character). It’s hardly fair to expect some colonial governor, who has to be good at administration and at convincing the local Maori to sell their land for a pittance, on top of all that to have a poetic soul as well. But places with a slightly thicker crust of history accumulate meaningful names. Maori placenames refer to ways the land was used, to legends and stories, to significant events, and to geological features (they probably include a few royal names as well, although none as prosaic as “George”). English placenames in England, too, carry historical information (“salt found here”) but that gets lost when they’re translated to the other side of the world.

Other parts of the globe suffer from precisely the opposite problem: too much overlaid history, leading to a chaos of placenames whose meanings, and even original languages, become lost. My Christmas stocking this year, in New Zealand, included John Man’s biography of Genghis Khan,3 which I read on the plane trip back to Amsterdam. One striking feature of this fascinating history is how many different civilisations, speaking different languages, get a mention once you are looking at a large enough area and a thousand of years of history rather than a scanty few hundred. So you get: “The people of Xi Xia referred to themselves as the Mi. […] The Chinese called them the Dangxian, while in Mongol they became Tangut (Dang plus a Mongolian -ut plural). The Tanguts of Xi Xia: that’s how they are known today.”4

And inspired by the multilingual multi-plural reduplication of “Tanguts”, I’ll finish with a lovely bit of nonsense from Steven Brust’s The Phoenix Guards:5

The Serioli, who departed the area to avoid any of the unfortunate incidents that war can produce, left only the name for the place, which was “Ben”, meaning “ford” in their language. The Easterners called the place “Ben Ford”, or, in the Eastern tongue, “Ben gazlo”.

After ten years of fierce battle, the Imperial Army won a great victory on the spot, driving the Easterners well back into the mountains. The Dragonlords who had found the place, then, began calling it “Bengazlo Ford.” The Dragons, wishing to waste as little time on speech as possible, shortened this to Benglo Ford, or, in the tongue of the Dragon, which was still in use at the time, “Benglo ara.” Eventually, over the course of the millenia, the tongue of the Dragon fell out of use, and the Northwestern6 language gained preeminence, which rendered the location Bengloara Ford, which was eventually shorted to Bengloarafurd. The river crossing became the Bengloarafurd Ford, which name it held until after the Interregnum when the river was dredged and the Bengloarafurd Bridge was built.

Notes:

  1. The placenames have macrons because I’m conscientiously copy-pasting them from Wikipedia to make sure of the spelling, but I don’t have easy access to macrons by typing. If the names indeed enter common currency I’m sure they will erode away fairly quickly anyway. [↪]
  2. No, I don’t know this stuff by heart. Blame Wikipedia. [↪]
  3. My sister just got married to a Mongolian man, so the family has developed quite an interest in the area. [↪]
  4. The story of the survival of the 13th-century Secret History of the Mongols is equally multilingual. It was recorded by Ming officials in Chinese characters (which make a very imperfect match to the Mongolian original; Man gives the analogy of writing Hamlet’s famous soliloquy in nonsense French, beginning Tu bille orne hôte tu bille), and retranslated back into Mongolian beginning only in the late 19th century: “tricky if you are working from fourteenth-century Chinese to restore thirteenth-century Mongol, neither of which anyone knows how to pronounce”. [↪]
  5. The stuffy style is deliberate, and one of the joys of the book — however unlikely that may appear from this short extract. [↪]
  6. Brust, too, sometimes makes overly heavy use of the compass in his worldbuilding. [↪]