Yinglong Fujun’s Linguistic Corner 5 – History as Seen from Toponyms, Part 3 · 10:21am Sep 27th, 2013
Without further ado, let us resume the foray into Equestrian place names.
Macintosh Hills
I think people in most Anglospheric cultures should immediately recognize “mac” as an indicator of Scottish heritage. Indeed, Mac (shortened form: Mc) means “son of” in Scottish Gaelic. Before the times of fixed surnames, people just have their first name, which followed or preceded the name of their fathers (patronymics) or mothers (matronymics) plus surname prefixes. Governments, for the ease of record, would later gradually encourage or coerce people to adopt fixed surnames; in many case, people just adopt their patronymics as last names.
As for Macintosh, it derives from the Gaelic Mac an Toisich, which means “Son of the Toisich (cognate to Irish Taoiseach, now the official term for Irish president, originally meaning chief, leader or thane)”. The Clan Mackintosh is one of the most influential clans in Scotland, and John McIntosh is one of the Scotsmen who bear this surname. He was a farmer whose father immigrated to New York, later moving to Canada to join the loyalist cause. He discovered and transplanted some wild apple trees seedlings to his garden, one of them later produced the crispy red fruits we now know as “McIntosh Red”. Of course, the first massively popular pop cultural reference to the name McIntosh as in the apple cultivar is the Apple personal computers Macintosh.
In the FIM setting, Macintosh Hills are to the south of Appleloosa, together two toponyms with a reference to apples. Is it that apple-growers are one of the more influential groups in the population especially in the southern parts of the land? Anyway, though it cannot be said about all strains of earth ponies, but that some parts of their culture are mirroring Scottish heritage in the US can certainly be considered. Let’s give it a “Culture E/G” label for the time being.
As for “hill”, previous Linguistic Corner mentioned that it displaces the older English word “don”. However, hill itself is also a word with roots in Old English (hyll).
Additional note: Apples and horses are often linked together because diced apples are a popular treat to feed to horses. Most horses like apples and it is quite nutritious for them. Though in the wild, horses seldom have the chances to feast on apples unless accidents or storms knock a large number of them down.
Appleloosa
See Linguistic Corner 2.
Badlands
Badlands are types of terrain which are characterized by dryness and highly eroded clay or sedimentary rock formations. These kinds of terrain often produce spectacular geological forms like canyons, arches and all sorts of strange-looking rock formations.
One would think a simple compound word like this would have a long history. Not quite, as it was first attested only in 1852 to describe the “arid, highly eroded regions of the western United States”. Its component words however, being basic English words, are naturally quite old and Germanic-based (Old English: (possibly)bæddel + land).
It is curious to note that there are both roads/rails leading south across the Macintosh Hills and Badlands. We can only assume they lead to somewhere yet to appear on the storyboard of the writers.
Hayseed Swamps
Hayseed is first attested in the 1570s in its literal sense as ‘grass seeds shaken out of hay”. Its component words are Germanic via Old English (heg + sæd). In the US, the word acquired its somewhat derogatory sense referring to a “comical rustic” or “country bumkin” in around the 1870s. In those times, it is common to call a country person “still having hayseeds in his/her hair”.
Perhaps for fear of being insensitive (think the whole Derpy/Ditzy episode), earlier versions of the map indicated the place as “Haysead Swamp”. Still, it does not mask the etymology of the word very well, and have since been corrected to the current name in the April 2013 version of the map (that is, the one shown in the Part 2 and above).
Now, I would be the first to wryly point out unfairness and injustice in a sugarbowl setting like FIM, but in this case I think it is more likely that the place is named in the literal sense given how hay plays a big part in the pony culture. Though, it is again quite amusing to think it as an epithet given by unicorn elites to mud-rolling swamp-dwellers.
The word swamp itself is Germanic. Some say it is from an Old English cognate of Old Norse svoppr surviving in a dialectal form. Traditionally it is also said to be connected to Middle English sompe "morass, swamp", which in turn come from Dutch or Low German. It is a nice case showing how languages crossbreed. And the fact that the southeastern part of the land is swampy is presumably mirroring the swampy environs of real-life Southeastern United States like South Carolina and Florida.
Horseshoe Bay
Horseshoe Bay is a West Vancouver, British Columbia community of about 1,000 permanent residents. The bay is so named as its shape resembles a horseshoe.
Sorry, I’ll try again.
Gleaning from the geographical location and the fact that Baltimare lies on its shore, it is likely that Horseshoe Bay’s real-life referent is the Chesapeake Bay. Chesapeake is the seventh oldest surviving English toponyms in the US. In the native Algonquian tongue, it means “(village at a) big water”.
The word horseshoe, on the other hand, was first attested in the 14th century, its components words have their respective Old English roots (hors + scoh). It was long believed, almost back since the word was coined, that finding a horseshoe by chance means good luck for the finder (and bad luck for the horse, I presume).
The real-life Chesapeake is fed from many rivers, the largest ones include Susquehanna, Potomac and Rappahannock. Most of those rivers originate from east side of the Appalachians. But in the Equestrian map, we see that the river which flows into the Horseshoe bay extends into the heartlands of Equestria. To prevent cluttering up the linguistics with talks of rivers, I will later devote a separate post on the hydrology of Equestria.
Baltimare
There can hardly be a more punnable toponym save for those that actually contain names of horses or their body parts. Baltimore is the largest city in the state of Maryland, US. Its name has an Irish/Gaelic root. Cecilius Calvert, Lord Baltimore, an English peer in Ireland, championed the effort of founding the Maryland Colony. Baltimore is itself an Anglicization of Irish Baile an Tí Mhóir, “town of the big house”.
The word “mare” came from Old English (mere/myre), however, it is said to be introduced into Germanic languages from Gaulish, a Celtic language. This is why Gaelic cognate for this word actually exists, which is “marc” (cf. Welsh march, Breton marh “horse”).
Baltimare as it is now is a curious amalgamate of languages, which could be taken to mean “town of the mare house”. If we want to unify the etymological origins of individual components of the word, the original Irish would become Baile an Tí Mhairc and most probably Anglicized as Baltimark. But then no normal person on earth would understand the pun. For shame.
Fillydelphia
Philadelphia was named by its founder William Penn. He had envisioned a city without religious persecution and filled with fraternal friendship among its residents. Hence, in his naming he combined the Greek words philos “love or friendship” and adelphos “brother”.
Filly is from Middle English fyly, a female foli (foal). Fyly, in turn, was most probably derived from Old Norse fylja.
Fillydelphia literally means something like “fraternal fill(ies)”. Some may point out that in English, we usually refer to “brotherly” relationship between females as “sororal”. In Greek though, all sorts of brotherly or sisterly relationships are denoted by the word “adelfikós”. So let’s give a pass to this kinda weird name. By the way, the Greek for filly is “foradítsa”, it might be a bit too long to incorporate into a city name in the way Penn did it.
Up to now, in addition to Native American languages, we already have a number of tongues in the mix: English, Dutch, Spanish, Scottish, Irish and Greek. Let's keep on looking and then see what we find.
Now I need to incorporate Celtic/Gaelic roots into earth pony linguistic history. Dagnabbit. (Greek = pegasus, Spanish = Modren Latin = unicorn, Dutch, English = western / Low German = earth pony)
I was thinking about using Gaelic for batponies, but I actually prefer to give them a Caucasian or Sanskritic language instead.
So,Scotch-Irish ponies, where do they come from? Were there once two distinct tribes of earth ponies? How would that work? what sort of cultural and historical implications would there be? Must ponder further...
1379062 Tough job innit?
1380566 Stupid English borrowing words from everywhere.