Yinglong Fujun's Linguistic Corner 2 - When an Apple is not an apple

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And of course I am not talking about the company, because that would be too obvious.
So *Apple-, as in place names/surnames, may actually not refer to the fruit that we know and love. They may mean something else entirely. And this is due to the complex and unique linguistic contact in historical Britain.
In the show, everything starts with the word Apple is a reference to the fruit. In real life, residents in towns or people with surnames that start with Apple may also think of or even consciously take on associations with the fruit, like planting one on their front yard. But it may be one huge misunderstanding on how the word originated, depending on which Apple- they are
Before getting into etymology, let's talk a little apple the fruit. Nowadays different apple cultivars are planted all over the world living in different climates. But in medieval times we don't have greenhouses or all those advanced agricultural technologies. You've got places which were too dry, too hot, too cold, too windy or did not have thick, well-drained enough soil to plant apple trees. Yet some of these places had the word Apple stuck onto them.
This is because of anglicization at work. People anglicize foreign names, sometimes to make it less harsh on their mouth or easier to think in their native tongue. Sometimes, elements that sound to English ears like ‘apple’ become, naturally, apple.
For example, 'Applecross' does not really mean 'cross on an apple' or some such. Before the Anglo-Saxons, ancient British lived on the British Isles, and they speak Celtic languages, some of them ancestor of modern-day Irish, Cornish, Welsh and Scottish Gaelic while others went extinct. Older place names, in whatever languages, are often derived from their nearby terrain: mountains, hills, rivers, bay, grassland, forest, source of minerals, food and water, etc. For example, Aber- (e.g. Aberdeen) and Inver- (e.g. Inverness) are two commonly heard place-name elements of Celtic origin, meaning river mouth/confluence. We still see a lot of Aber-s and Inver-s in Wales and Scotland. However, some Celtic languages simply died out and only left its trace in place names, one of them is the mysterious Pictish language, which was gradually replaced by Scottish Gaelic brought along by settlers from Ireland. In Pictish, the equivalent of Aber- is Apor-, the small village of Aporcrosan (confluence at the River Crossan) in northwest Scotland was later anglicized as, you know it, Applecross.
And there we have ‘Apple’loosa, which come from Appaloosa (something that apparently confuses a lot of fan fic writers, since many of them use both forms interchangeably). If we are using the stringent criteria to define whether a toponym ‘makes sense’ as in LingCorn 1, it doesn’t. Appaloosa most likely came from Palouse, the francised name of an American native tribe Palus, and along with the region around them in Northwestern US. It wouldn’t make etymological sense to break the name up in the middle and plug in your puns, just like why you don’t segment John into Jo and ohn. (Unless you’re Monty Python.)
Still, there are of course many more cases in which ‘apple’ does mean apple the fruit. For example, Appleton (Place where apples grow), Applewhite (Apple meadow), Appleby (Apple orchard), Applegate (Apple orchard enclosure), Applebaum/Appledore (Apple tree), Applequist (Twig of apple tree) and Appley (Apple tree clearing). So people with these surnames can be reassured – they do refer to bona fide apples.
And last, let me ask you to consider a possibility, however remote: what if the apple puns in the show, like those non-fruit apples, originally also mean something else in another language? I think that actually makes for interesting lore for world-builders.

Up next: A Glimpse into the Past - Toponyms and Historical Geography