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Services. 2026-09-17 20:49:04 - Paul D. Foy - PlaceNames This blog is a place where you can find salient truths and facts. There's no nonsense on this blog although there are connotations of nonsense if you so read it. It's late on a Thursday evening and I'm motivated to post something here. I'm motivated to post something about place names and the salient truths you can discover around place names. I've been motivated to do this recently because of an interest in the origin of the Dortmund place name in Germany. Conventional accounts are quite ambiguous and convoluted and start with things like the first utterances of the name in writing: throttiminni and things like that. That has been a rather convoluted start to the word Dortmund. When it comes to place names, things can be both very simple and very complex. Indeed the simple and the complex can mean the same thing and different unrelated things can have, in their origin, the same meaning. For example, door: we all know what door is. It's an opening, an entrance, a way in. In Old English, dōr also means door, opening, but there are very similar terms, dorth and dōrp, in both Old English and Dutch that mean place, settlement, as well as door, perhaps. Indeed a door, a way in, is like a valley or a river bed so it can also mean river bed or river valley. When you're founding a place you often find the place by a river. You want a source of water and there are often advantageous areas to grow crops near to rivers and streams. Dōr means place, settlement, river, stream, opening, passage. They're all the same. There again we add further little letters onto these things and we've got dōth or dōrt. Dōrt means there so the place where you found, where you settle is there. It's where you are. It's the door, it's the river. They all mean the same thing. They're where you want to be. It means where I am, where you want to be. It's the place where you are. It's the natural thing to call it. It's my place. Mund in Dortmund: mund means mouth but dort means mouth, river bed so it's all mixed up. We've got two terms meaning the same thing and it's fairly simple. They mean mouth nowadays and they mean door or dōrt nowadays as well. You don't need to go back thousands of years to find these things. You just look around yourself. You just look at the present and you think about things. Post a comment: |