Eel Castle - general lingo confusion

Etymology of place names facinates me because English (and I do mean English and not British or UKish) placenames can come from many sources, Saxon/German, Viking/Danish, Roman/Romance and Brythonic/British Celtic.

 

For example a place where my mother's family comes from is Aldeburgh, the "burgh" there is the same word as the Danish "borg" and also means "castle" and "Alde" here is simply "old" (Auld - Alde - Olde - Old) so Aldeburgh is "Old Castle". Similarily the town where I work is Alton, that also derives from "Alde" and the "ton" is another word of nordic origin derived from 'tun' which in Old English became 'toun' and 'ton' that we now spell as 'town' so Alton is "Old Town".

 

Fifteen miles (twenty-four klicks) from here is Winchester, the "chester" is the Saxonised Roman equivalent of "borg" (erm... it gets complicated). The Roman name for Winchester was Venta Belgarum, which means "market place of the Belgae [tribe]" (I could digress here on the meaning of "Belgae" from whence "Belgium" comes - in Brythonic it means "to be angry"). The Romans put a legion of troops in this market town and fortified it, the Roman for camp is "castra", so for the Saxons it became Wintanceastre where "ceastre" means "camp of the [Roman] Legions" (which in Brythinic/Celtic is "caer"). The word "castle" is also derived from "castra" and  "chester" is the Englishised form of "ceastre" and means "fortified town", just like "borg" and "burgh", in Welsh "caer" means fortified [town] and "cas" means castle.

 

 

 

Copenhagen, or København, as "Buy A Harbour" probably isn't too far from the truth, like the Roman name for Winchester as Venta Belgarum means "Market of the the Belgae", København could perhaps alternatively be translated as "Harbour of the Buyers" or "Buyer's Haven" ... however the accepted meaning is "Harbour of Merchants"

 

 

 

Another English town of Danish origin is Grimsby or Grim's Town - which in modern Danish would transliterate as "Ugly's Town", but is more likely to refer to Oden as the masked one ('Grimnir') so would be "Oden's Town"

The whole etymology of languages and how it all fits together from waaaaaaaaaaaay back is very interesting to me. What initially struck me funny bone was the direct translation of words though. It's also what sometimes makes me cry with laughter, when I come across reviews done through a Google translator. 

It is impossible for there to have been a universal dialect because a dialect is by definition peculiar to a specific region or social group - two groups of people seperated by distance can be speaking the same language but in different dialects. From that, because dialects can and do change drastically over relatively small distances, it would tend to make a pan-Earth language untenable. Especially so if the "Recent Out of Africa" hypothesis is correct.

 

The problem with language is we have no idea what the spoken word was in antiquity, let alone in pre-history (ie it is unattested). What we have is written evidence of language that dates back a few thousand years at best, and only a few hundred for most current Earth languages. Yet homo sapiens sapiens is somewhere between 100 and 200 thousand years old and our physiology hasn't changed much in that time - the mental capacity we have now we had then and so the capability for speech and language we have now we had then. We didn't evolve into humans and then take a further 196,000 years to evolve spoken language, it is more likely that language evolved with our capability for speech and it has continued to change since then.

 

We can never know anything of the languages that we spoke in those 196,000 years, but we can predict that it was different from region to region, tribe to tribe and the more isolated any two communities were from each other the more diversified their language would have been to the point where they could no longer understand each other. If there ever was one single language that was understood by the entire population of the World then that population would have been very small and confined to a small region of Earth with constant communication between all members of that population. Realistically that would be something like 60,000 years ago if the Recent Out of Africa hypothesis is true but it could be 2 million years ago if the Multiregional hypothesis is true

 

You could say that both support monogenesis of language since they would both have the human migration starting from a single location and moving over the face of the earth, taking their mother tongue with them. However the people who support monogenesis point to commonality within diverse languages as the traces of that original mother-tongue, and we have no way of knowing how far language can diversify in 60,000 or more years to say whether that is true commonality, co-incidence or even some genetic blue-print based upon intuition and emotion noises (for example laughter, screaming in pain and crying are essentially "genetic", they are not learnt). Also, the migration of language does not necessarily follow human migration paths (tree model) - a language can spread from one indigenous people to another with commerce and trade, we borrow words from other languages and adapt foreign speech patterns (wave model).