In native Mesoamerican languages the meaning of place names are usually expressed by calques (semantic loans expressed in morphemes specific to each language). Is the latter practice found in other cultural regions?
A large number of the rivers in the southern half of Spain begin with "guad-" (Guadalquivir, Guadiana, Guadalorce, Guadalete...), so we refer to "el río Guadiana", for instance. Funny thing is that "guad", in the Arabic spoken by the tribes entering the Peninsula after 711, means "river", so "el río Guadalquivir" actually means, in a word-by-word translation "the river River-the-quivir". Examples can be counted by dozens.
A particularly interesting case is that of Guadalupe and Riolobo, both common toponyms, meaning exactly the same: "the river [Arabic guad, Spanish río] of the wolf ["lupe" being closer to the original Latin lupus, "lobo" being the evolution of the term in Spanish today].
There is an old story (originally due to Mario Pei) about a place-name "Torpenhow hill" which, although probably not entirely factual (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Torpenhow_Hill for details) still illustrates a genuine tendency for languages to take what was originally a description and to treat it as a proper name.
According to the story the original hill or ridge was called "Tor" (hill). Later, when the meaning of this name was no longer transparent to speakers it came to be called Torpen (Tor hill), then, still later, Torpenhow (Torpen hill), although the version "Torpenhow hill" is apparently only wishful thinking.
In Europe, many place names are not transparent, so a calque makes little sense. Dutch sailors used to Dutchify many names of ports (e.g. Plymouth would be Plymuiden, with the Dutch toponymical noun -muiden). Nowadays, it is custom to retain the local name, except for very common names, e.g. Berlijn for Berlin, Londen for London, Parijs for Paris, en Milaan for Milano. This is also true for, say, German names for non-German places: the most familiar places have a German name (Mailand for Milano), the others keep their local name.
In Croatian, exonyms (names used in a specific language for a geographical feature situated outside the area where that language is spoken) are customarily used for names of the states/countries; while we tend to keep local names for other toponyms (eg. cities...).
However, due to long historical, cultural, geographical and similar reasons, certain toponyms are always used in their exonimic forms (even cities, for example Beč - Vienna, Rim - Rome, Budimpešta - Budapest, Solun - Thessaloniki..., there is a representative list on this link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Croatian_exonyms). Many of them are actually calques.
Nevertheless, UNGEGN (United Nations Group of Experts on Geografical Names) generally recommends using endonyms, and not introducing new exonyms.
A large number of the rivers in the southern half of Spain begin with "guad-" (Guadalquivir, Guadiana, Guadalorce, Guadalete...), so we refer to "el río Guadiana", for instance. Funny thing is that "guad", in the Arabic spoken by the tribes entering the Peninsula after 711, means "river", so "el río Guadalquivir" actually means, in a word-by-word translation "the river River-the-quivir". Examples can be counted by dozens.
A particularly interesting case is that of Guadalupe and Riolobo, both common toponyms, meaning exactly the same: "the river [Arabic guad, Spanish río] of the wolf ["lupe" being closer to the original Latin lupus, "lobo" being the evolution of the term in Spanish today].
We also do that with toponyms of distant languages like Japanese or Chinese: Beijing, Tokyo are not called "Northern capital" or "Eastern capital"(JING and KYO is the same Chinese character!). The other way round, Chinese also tries to create homophone toponyms that are acceptable for the Chinese way of spelling: Moscow - Mosike, Paris - Bali (in Pinyin transcription without tone marks).However there are a few interesting exceprions: Oxford = Niujin (cow/ox + ford, passage), San Francisco = Jiujinshan (Old Gold mountain)...
In Czech there is a lot of traditionally used exonyms for some cities (i.e. Řím - Rome, Paříž - Paris, Londýn - London, Damašek - Damascus...), sometimes for geographical areas (Aljaška - Alaska) and almost always for countries and states. The longer the place in question is know in our country, the bigger is the chance that there is an exonym for it. Sometime however the exonym can fall out of use - for example "Kaliningrad" used to be called "Královec".
Thanks again to all who answered. The wide geographical scope of the examples helps put it all into perspective.
Interestingly (if Google translate is to be trusted), in Chinese, Tokyo is called Dongjing (= Eastern Capital) whereas in Japanese, Beijing is called Pekin.
Hi Jakub! I guess you don't know Spanish, if so, you woull understand how well the prefix "guad" reflects Arabic "wad". Being "w" a semivowel. it is very easy to pronounce a "g" sound before the "w". In bad and very frequent spoken Spanish, many people say "güevo", instead of "huevo" (egg).
Dear colleague, I send you attached a reseach concerning the translation of toponyms in South-East Europe. I hope to help you answer your question.
Signs, Cultures and Ideology in Southeast Europe.Semiotic codes in language, cultural and translation attitudes from the perspective of the Greeks https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Evangelos_Kourdis/publications/
Thank you, Evangelos, but I can't find the article or link.
Please try in this link:
http://ekourdis.webpages.auth.gr/?page_id=158&lang=en
Some traditional exonyms in Albanian for some cities: Frankfurt (German: Frankfurt am Main): Frankfurt-mbi-Majn [definite] – Frankfurti-mbi-Majn [indefinite]; Istanbul (Turkish: İstanbul): Stamboll – Stambolli; London: Londër – Londra; Munich (German: München): Munih; Moskva (Russian: Москва) Moskë – Moska; Rio de Janeiro: Rio-de-Zhanejro – Rio-de-Zhanejroja; Saint Helena [an island]: Shën-Elenë – Shën-Elena; Thessaloniki (Greek: Θεσσαλονίκη): Selanik – Selaniku; Vienna (German: Wien): Vjenë – Vjena
To add to what Jack Hoeksma said, many European place names are not transparent, and in many cases this is due to their age.
For example, take the French city Aix. When it was founded in 123 BC, it had a transparent name to anyone who knew Latin. It was Aquae Sextiae, the settlement by the (water) springs founded by Roman Counsel Sextiae Calvinus following his victory over Gallic settlement nearby.
Over the centuries, it became reduced to Aix. But eventually, with the spread of literacy, maps, and the ability to travel, Aix had to be expanded upon. In this case, we're dealing with Aix-en-Provence. There are 10 other places named Aix in France, so the language clarifying the location among the Aix's of France was necessary when which Aix was not obvious.
There are many similar situations in Europe, with settlements or geographical features having the same name as another in a different area, resulting in the addition of a clarifying addition to the name (like Frankfurt am Main and Frankfurt on der Oder).
In the case of Meso-America, many place names are transparent because they were relatively recently founded. By "relatively recently" I mean after the printing press was invented and maps were becoming commonly available. This resulted in a need for establishing names for foreign locations in each language that a map (or other text) was to be printed in.
What would be comparable to many European place names with respect to their ages would be place names given by the Maya, Aztecs, and other locations that are 700-2000 (or more) years old.
But as others have pointed out, there is much variation among languages as to the specific form of a city's name in a language. "Warszawa" is going to be "Warsaw" on English maps, "Warschau" for Germans, "Varsovie" in France, regardless of what the Polish people would like.
Warsaw is, however, rendered as Warszawa on David Bowie's Low album.
Janis Silis (Jānis Sīlis - in the original Latvian spelling: with diacritical lengthening signs over "a" and the 1st "i")
In Latvian we do not have the graphic (spelling) identity, but the phonetic identity when dealing with all proper names - i.e., we try to reproduce the sound form in our traditional graphic signs (letters of Latin alphabet with some diacritical lengthening and palatalization signs. Cultures with the graphic identity perceive this as violation of the person's identity, but for us it is vice versa - the GRAPHIC representation of persona; names and place names is perceived by Latvians as a violation of their personal identity. An example of our spelling of foreign anthroponyms: Džeimss (James), Džons (John), Mērija (Mary), Cepfs (Zoepf); denominations of (business) companies: Sīmenss (Siemens), Rolsroiss (Rolls Royce), Pežo (Peugeot).
Lavians still are disappointed with the decision of the central institutions of the EU to impose "euro" as the accepteble Latvian name for the currency. In Latvian pronunciation, and therefore also in speliing it should be "eiro", because other words with the same root in Latvian have always been spelt with "ei" [ei] - Eiropa (Europe), eiropejisks (European) etc. We perceive this decision as something so unnatural to the essence of our native language, that even Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union did not dare to accomplish such barbaric move. But the EU has done it in cold bureaucratic nochalance...
Thanks to all recent responders.
James: In ancient and colonial period Mesoamerica there was a tendency among speakers of native languages to avoid loan words in which morphemes from neighboring languages were imported or adapted. There are exceptions; I am speaking of a general tendency. What we usually find are calques, in which the ideas behind the words are loaned, constructing the word in the borrowing language from its own preexisting morphemes. This is particularly the case with the words Europeans classify as "proper names", but can be also found in other semantic categories, even in metaphorical couplets known to Mesoamericanists as "difrasismos" (a term in Spanish coined by Ángel María Garibay Kintana in the mid-20th century). This discussion is relevant to understanding central Mexican pictorial writing around the time of the Spanish conquest, since many pictorial place signs could be "read" in several languages (semasiography), while others exploit homophonic word play (the rebus principle) to express morphemes in a given language (glottography). I have observed that in Europe the phonological forms of place names tend to be loaned more than the underlying semantic concepts, and contributions to this thread tend to confirm that observation. I suspect that there is a fundamental cultural difference here, regarding how place names were/are thought about.
David,
You might consider German "Mittelmeer"¨ (sea in the middle) as an approximate calque of "Mediterraneum" (Middle of the land).
David, I'm not sure what you mean by a "cultural" difference here. First, because I don't know what you mean by "culture". Second, because I think that we've mostly already supplied the answers as to why European toponyms tend to cluster phonetically rather than semantically.
First, we have the general fact that the age of the place names and the changes in them over the past has rendered many of them semantically opaque even to the inhabitants.
In many cases we are dealing with toponyms whose origin may be 2000-3000 years old. If you consider the cultures of the western Mediterranean regions to be part of the pool of names we are dealing with, some of those names may be 6000-8000 years old. Anatolia, the Fertile Crescent, Mediterranean North Africa, and the Nile Valley were both important contributors to the development of European languages, especially writing, but were also part of the major European empires that were the dominant cultures within Europe for hundreds of years.
Most of Europe east of the Rhine, north of the Danube, and more than a few miles from the northern shore of the Black Sea were never part of the Roman Empire. Egypt was under Greco-Roman rule for 900 years. The modern European writing system is derived from that of the Phoenicians/Carthaginians and the dominant religion attained its dominance first in the Levant, the Nile Valley, and Anatolia.
Two of the major European language families, the Germanic and the Slavic, can hardly be said to exist more than 2000-2500 years ago, if that.
So we have opaque names whose origins are lost due to language change over time.
Related to this, you are also comparing a small area of the world with a very large area. Mesoamerica is the region from central Mexico to northern Costa Rica. That's about 1.63 million km2 (throwing in all of Costa Rica and including 2/3 of Mexico).
The EU alone is 4.38 million km2, and that leaves out a very large part of geographic Europe. It also excludes millions of km2 of areas that were major influences in terms of cultures and languages that are in Africa and Asia (and were also part of political entities controlled by Europeans.
There is a vast difference between Malta and Murmansk compared to Hermosilla and San Jose.
Then we have the general principle of places being named by or for the people who live there, or who are the dominant inhabitants.
And we have phonetic based transmission of names because we have a phoneme based writing system.
This also seems critical to the difference. I am not an expert on Mesoamerican languages. But from what I do know, both the writing systems, the level of literacy within the cultures, and the intent for making an impression on the non-literate public, seems to me to be more like the system found in pre-Ptolomaic Egypt than that found in Europe and North Africa following the formations of the Greek, Carthaginian, and Roman empires.
I also feel a bit confused because if I look at a map of Mesoamerica, I see dozens of places with names that are direct transplants from Spanish with a Nuevo added. El Salvador and Costa Rica are Spanish names. So are Puerto Vallarta, Guadalajara, Leon, Veracruz, San Jose, Santa Ana (and every other place with San or Santa in the name).
Naming new cities after cities in the country of the founders is as old as writing (Cartago Costa Rica is named after the Spanish word for Carthage, which is Phoenician for "new city", and our current alphabet is derived from the Phoenician system).
I can see plenty of place names that look like they are derived from native names. But I live in Massachusetts, and have lived in Michigan and Illinois, and grew up on Long Island, which has a huge amount of native-language derived place names, so this is also hardly a Mesoamerican innovation.
I feel like some examples would help here. We have plenty of examples from Europe, but not so much from Mesoamerica. Does Veracruz have multiple names? If so, how does the concept of the "true cross" get expressed in the languages of non-Christians?
Thanks for your comments and questions, James. I should clarify that my question and later posts refer to native Mesoamerican languages, not Spanish toponyms imposed within their New World colonies.
In Mesoamerica there was/is a tendency to favor semantic rather than phonetic values when translating place names. Places had/have a phonetically very distinct name in each of the many languages used in that región (unless the languages were/are closely related), and the meanings tend to be identical or at least similar. What has been posted to date on this thread tends to confirm my initial impression that in Europe the tendency is the other way around, favoring phonetic renderings, albeit approximate, at the expense of meanings. Of course there are exceptions (in Europe more than in Mesoamerica), so this tendency should not be considered a rule. The "why" of this situation still eludes me, although there are some interesting clues in this thread. Your suggestion regarding the use of a phoneme based writing system in recent millenia is certainly a factor to be considered.
Regarding "culture," there is an article of mine with an attempt to define this concept on my ResearchGate "Contributions" page (although I'm sorry to say that it is in Spanish). If you like I can translate the working definition I came up with after several pages of deliberation.
Here is an example of a typical Mesoamerican toponym: the modern city of Querétaro, in north central Mexico, had/has a Tarascan name (Querétaro) that means "place of the ball game," refering to the ritual game played with a latex ball since the second millenium BCE. Sixteenth century manuscripts give the Náhuatl equivalent Tlachco, meaning "place of the ball game." Manuscripts from the early colonial period provide the Otomí name Andämaxei for the same place, which means "the big ball court;" modern Otomí from the neighboring Mezquital Valley in the state of Hidalgo still use a contracted form of the latter toponym, Ndämxei, although they don't know that this refers to the ancient ball game, which hasn't been played in this region for centuries. In the native codices, several places called "Tlachco" in Náhuatl are expressed with a pictorial sign resembling a ground plan of a Mesoamerican ball court, shaped like our letter H. Such a semasiographic sign could be read in any language where the corresponding place means something like "ball court."
Tarascan, Náhuatl, and Otomí belong to three very different language families that probably began to diverge from a proto-Amerindian language brought by immigrants from northeastern Asia before 10,000 BCE. The linguistic diversity of Mesoamerica is wider and deeper than that of Europe, considering that most European languages are Indo-European, which probably diverged from a proto-language five or six milennia ago. As more milennia go by, the harder it is to identify cognates in related languages (and the less similar cognates will sound). This is another factor to be considered, and is probably more relevant than geographic distance (although geographic barriers such as seas and mountain ranges are factors in determining linguistic diversification throughout both space and time).
I don't think anyone has any useful degree of certainty as to when migrants from Asia and/or Europe and/or Polynesia first, second, third, or whenever, came to North America or South America, how they did it, and what languages they spoke.
I also don't think anyone really knows enough about the history of Native American languages to decide how many families or other groupings there were: reasonable experts have claimed anywhere from a few hundred to three. I have strong doubts that there are any methods that could be used to settle this issue.
However, Indo-European language history is something that much more is known about, and the current best estimates for divergence is more in the 8000-10000 year range. For Europe, this goes along with genetic evidence (mitochondrial and Y-chromosome) and archaeological evidence indicating that the languages likely spread with agricultural technologies from Anatolia or the Fertile Crescent. Less is known about the Indo-Aryan branch. But the most popular alternative, spreading with domestication of horses from the grasslands stretching from modern Ukraine to modern Mongolia. But 5000-6000 is not out of the question either.
I was not asking for any detailed definition of culture. I am going to assume that Tarascans, Náhuatls, and Otomís would be considered different cultures in Mesoamerican studies. So my question is about "Europe". Are the Germans and French different cultures? Germans and Netherlanders? Dutch and Frisians? I am pretty sure I know what the answers would be if you asked people from these groups.
However, we still have another problem with our time scale. We know that non-Indo-European linguistic groups were long considered to be more a part of the "civilized" world by Europeans who could write than Europeans from places where it snowed. Egyptians and Phoenicians/Carthaginians were most certainly more civilized than the unshaven hordes beyond the Alps, as far as the Romans and Greeks were concerned.
We also know that these non-Indo-European linguistic groups were the people who invented writing for the region, and developed from a pictographic system to a phonetic system. Many prominent "European" scientists, philosophers, and religious figures spent their lives in North Africa or West Asia. After Rome, Alexandria was probably the most influential city of the ancient world, and it resisted longer than Rome did against invaders from abroad (though that "abroad" was also briefly part of the Roman Empire).
So I agree with you that as the millennia go by, cognates diverge and become less and less recognizable. That's the main issue with European languages: many toponyms are at least 1000 years old, and some within the sphere of European/Mediterranean cultures may be 10000 years old. Many important ones are 2000-2500 years old.
We also know that due to the effects of technology on language and transportation, the Europe-North Africa-West Asia region has had several centuries of harmonization of names (as well as a long tradition of using of certain languages for regional cross-cultural trade and diplomacy). The North Sea has had many names since the earliest Greek references to it, and the local variations of the concept existed until the 1940s ("the German Sea" was no longer considered a palatable option at this point", and regardless of geography, the Danes and Norwegians decided to go with the Netherlanders).
Even here, though, we have a European language outlier: the French. The French insist on using "Mer du Nord". The French generally use their own terms in a manner similar to the Mesoamericans. The Hoover Dam is "le barrage Hoover". The US President lives in la Maison-Blanche. The Netherlands are les Pays-Bas, regardless of the confusion it causes when grouped with the other two members of les Pays-Bas.
On the other hand, the Mesoamerican data seems to consist of a rather narrow time - 16th to 17th century, and to a rather small geographic region - Mesoamerican cultures in general may have used calques, but Mesoamerican cultures in particular most likely had no knowledge of place names further than a few days voyage away, aside from specialized professionals.
The difference in scope is still apparent from an earlier example. Aquae Sextiae was semantically transparent for the first few centuries after it was founded (123 BCE). 2000 years later, it isn't. The name was reduced to a single syllable, Aix (and syllable reduction is common among commonly used words).
Long distance travel and printed maps came a good deal after the name reduction had led to Aix and rendered this name insufficient: too many other former Latin toponyms in France (or France-adjacent) referring to springs of water had been reduced to "Aix". So the name was changed to "Aix-en-Provence".
Note that this change actually reintroduced semantic transparency: it was now the city named "Aix" that was in Provence, in contrast to the others that were in other places or had other distinguishing features (Aix-la-Chapelle, etc.) For most speakers of Romance or Germanic languages Aix-en-Provence is very close to a calque, especially in written form,but also phonetically similar, so it would be hard to distinguish whether keeping the French form was a phonetic borrowing or a semantic borrowing.
Aix-la-Chapelle, however, is not under French control, which has resulted in multiple names. The city is currently part of Germany, with did not have a history of Roman founded cities including the word "aquae" in them. But it is also on the border with Netherlands and Belgium, an area rich with linguistic diversity and political transitions.
So things are complex. Aachen was inhabited by the Romans as part of their boundary fortifications against the Germanic tribes across the river, and was known for its springs. It was also devoted to the Roman god of grain, and so called "Aquis Granum" (which Spanish retains as "Aquísgran"). However, being on the border of the Roman and Germanic realms, not only did the local Germanic peoples not have to be concerned with a proliferation of "Aix" in toponyms, they could just use their own word: "Bad".
This is not really a calque. The Germanics didn't say "the Romans call it "aquae", which in our language is "Bad", so we'll go with "Bad". Both the Romans and Germanics named the place after the same feature in their respective languages without any borrowing.
The "chapelle" part of the name is much more recent, built by the Emperor of many names which are locally semantic forms of English "Charles the Great" (here we have another set of parallel names that are not borrowings - Charlemagne and Karl der Große, or Karel de Grote, are all referring to the same person who ruled the region that developed contemporaneously).
So the French added the bit about the cathedral to the Latin-derived Aix, and dropped the pagan god. And despite the similarity of "Aachen" to a reduced form of "Aix-la-Chapelle", it independently evolved. The "Bad" part was dropped, and "Aachen" most likely developed from an old Germanic word for water "*ahha" or maybe "Âh", This root is common in rivers throughout the North European Plain, with several rivers named merely "Aa".
Given the location, there are more names. "Aken" is standard Nederlands (and most dialects), Frysk, or Plattdüütsch. In the specific dialect of the local people, the city is "Oche". In the more general dialect of the area, Limsburgs, it may be Oche, it may be Aoke. In Luxemburg, "Oochen". If you speak Zeêuws, you might use "Aeken".
So European toponyms are quite complex when viewed through the appropriate time scale, and when the full range of languages and dialects are considered. (These examples are not random, I know the French, Dutch, and German languages and the history of the area.)
But as with names in Europe itself, I suspect that the Mesoamerican practice of using calques diminished and disappeared along the same trajectory in time due to the same reasons. The growing ease of long distance travel and the use of maps made it more and more important to have a restricted range of names. Loss of native populations assisted in this process, but it seems we are dealing with a restricted set of data and uncertainty about how long this system had been practiced.
We also have uncertainty relative to the writing system. It is possible that when the Mediterranean area used writing systems that were pictographic or semi-pictographic, calques may have been common.
I think that when viewed in terms of historical patterns rather than current usage, European languages, and culturally related languages, have had a mix of phonetic and semantic relationships among toponyms. In terms of culture, I think that the driving force is technological culture - widespread printing of maps and books and similarly widespread literacy, and the same spreading of access to long-distance transportation and communications. Use of alphabets also made phonetic-based transliteration more likely to occur, but I wouldn't consider that a technological advancement.
Thanks for your comments, James. They are pertinent to my question. You provide some good examples. You also make some valid points on the impact of writing on linguistic habits. I'll just add that there has been a lot more work on the comparative linguistics in Mesoamerica than you realize. For an overview of the early studies, see volumen 11 of the Handbook of Middle American Indians. A more recent summary can be found in Lyle Campbell's American Indian Languages. Joseph Greenberg's book Language in the Americas is very interesting, albeit controversial (especially if you ask Campbell). Greenberg and Ruhlen have an article summarizing their work in Scientific American (267:5, November 1992). Traditional glottochronological calculations are now complemented by a new lexicostatistical method; look up "The Automated Similarity Judgment Program" and related articles on Søren Wichmann's ResearchGate page.
Studies calculating the time of linguistic divergence by lexicostatistics are useful, but very approximate, and should be treated as such. An important consideration is that if cognates cannot be detected between two languages (as when comparing Mesoamerican languages from distinct families or trunks), there is probably a greater chronological depth than that separating languages which have recognizable cognates (such as Indo-European tongues). All languages are most likely related (going back to the proto-language spoken by early modern Homo sapiens in Africa), but the further back you go the less similarities you find, until the trail becomes imposible to follow.
As for speakers of Otomí, Náhuatl, and Tarascan having belonged to distinct "cultures", this is too simplistic. Language is but one element in the complex mosaic of learned, shared behaviour that constitutes culture. Each of these elements should be treated as a separate variable. At the time of the Spanish conquest there was a relatively homogenous Central Mexican culture in which several language groups participated, sharing many of these cultural variables while verbalizing about them in their own, very distinct languages. Ethnic identity is another matter, and can draw on select cultural elements (which may or may not include language) and/or biological traits, which may be used to conceptually distinguish one group of people from another.
Mesoamerican toponymy goes back about two thousand years in Maya texts. Pre-Hispanic toponymy, including both glottographic and semasiographic pictorial signs, is also available from the Mixteca region in Oaxaca (several historical codices) and from central Mexico (for late examples, see the Piedra del Ex Arzobispado and the Piedra de Tizoc). I don't understand why you limit the corpus to 16th and 17th century sources.
Regarding the relative sizes of Europe and Mesoamerica, here is a map that helps put things into focus: http://www.chivacongelado.com/2011/06/mexican-geography-for-europeans/
The issue of culture came up when you suggested "that there is a fundamental cultural difference here, regarding how place names were/are thought about", with the implication that there was one "European culture". Which I thought was too simplistic, and rather than get into a lengthy discussion of what exactly a culture is, I was providing examples.
The same for Mesoamerican toponymy. You're the Mesoamerican expert, and the examples that you gave for the phenomenon that you started this question with were all or almost all from the 16th-17th centuries.
I'm the expert on European toponyms. I gave you an extremely detailed contrast between the names of two cities sharing an important element of their name across about 2000 years.
So any limitations that have been put on the Mesoamerican data are up to you, since you initiated the question, and provided the contrast with Mesoamerica. I, and most likely the rest of us, don't have a lot of knowledge about Mesoamerica, and expecting us to figure out the scope of Mesoamerican toponymic history is implausible.
I do, however, know how large Mexico is, which is a bit under 2 million km2. And, as I said before, the portion of Europe that is in the EU is 4.38 million km2. This leaves out Ukraine (600,000 km2), European Russia (almost 4million km2), Turkey, depending on your point of view (780,000 km2), Belarus, several Balkan nations, part of Kazakhstan, and the Caucasus. And we are also dealing with a region whose linguistic development is strongly tied to the coastal area of north Africa, the lower Nile valley, and the Fertile Crescent.
And there is a second reason for failure to find cognates between languages: lack of data, particularly lack of data that would allow one to track the sound changes over time. Phonemes can move in many directions. It is much easier to determine whether words are cognates or not if you know what sound shifts were characteristic of the languages and when they occurred.
Indo-European cognates are recognizable because there is a vast amount of source material, and there has been 300 years of work on Indo-European linguistics. Indo-European historical linguistics is the model for historical linguistics, both in the sense of being the first group systematically studied, but also in terms of what you can do when you have large amounts of texts available. You also have an abundance of texts from a separate language family for comparison (Afro-Asiatic). It is unlikely that anything like the knowledge about Indo-European could be determined other than for East Asia. But even there, you have a long history of writing but a general dominance of one language group, and no extensive contrasting language family.
If your comparative linguistics model that is derived from small or no samples of written material and poorly attested languages, and there is no non-linguistic evidence that would support the model, differs from what is known about Indo-European and Afro-Asiatic, I would suggest that it is more likely that the model is wrong. (by non-linguistic evidence, I mean archaeological, phenotypical, and/or genetic evidence indicating separation from contact with Eurasia for a very long time, as with New Guinea and Australia and the hunter-gathering tribes of southwest Africa.)
Thank you for your detailed response, James.
The matter of glottographic scripts (more prevalent in Europe over the last three millennia or so) versus semasiographic scripts (more prevalent in Mesoamerica, while the Maya used a mixed system with a higher percentage of glottograms) is certainly relevant to the discussion, as I noted earlier.
With the relative scarcity of glottographic texts from the pre-Hispanic period in Mesoamerica (other than the huge corpus of Mayan inscriptions), linguists working on these problems detect patterns in phonetic differences between related languages and reconstruct hypothetical proto-languages, as they have done with the Indo-European family. This gives a framework for determining if words are cognates or not, since the changes follow regular patterns. I don't do this sort of research myself, but I try to keep up with what others have contributed and use their work to try to understand the big picture, as well as taking it into account for solving specific problems relating to the interpretation of native pictorial and alphabetical documents from pre-Hispanic and colonial period central Mexico.
For another example of a toponymical calque between Otomí and Nahuatl, I just uploaded one of my rare articles in English to my ResearchGate page:
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/259443797_Cloud_Serpent_King_of_the_Place_of_the_Flowering_Tender_Ears_of_Corn_an_interpretation_of_the_pictorial_and_verbal_signs_in_an_Otom_codex
You need not be concerned with the issue of "small or no samples of written material and poorly attested languages" in the case of the better-known Mesoamerican linguistic groups like Nahuatl, Otomí, Mixtec, Zapotec, Tarascan, or Yucatecan Maya, as documentation is abundant to say the least, and we have an enormous and constantly expanding corpus of non-linguistic evidence for this cultural region. Check out some of the sources I mentioned in a previous post, or thumb through the bibliography in volumen two of my dissertation, available here at the ResearchGate site. It is from 2005, and I have a couple of linear meters of material which I would like to integrate into an updated versión, although time for this has been scarce, so the pile continues to grow. Manuscripts with detailed grammars and lengthy vocabularies of Mesoamerican languages were being produced by friars in the second quarter of the sixteenth century. The first printed works were published in 1555 (a Nahuatl vocabulary), 1558 (a Tarascan grammar), 1559 (a Tarascan dictionary), and 1571 (a grammar and an expanded vocabulary of Nahuatl), all of these before the appearance of the first printed grammar of English. We have descriptive works on Otomí from the late sixteenth century, and a printed catechism from the same period, while the first printed grammar on Otomí was produced in the eighteenth century. The complete inventory of descriptive sources is far too long to deal with here. Specialists have been working on an inventory of alphabetical manuscripts in Mesoamerican languages for a decade, although the results of this collective effort have not been published yet. The project includes all written genres, not only linguistic sources. Meanwhile the somewhat dated and incomplete inventories in the Handbook of Middle American Indians provide an accesible overview.
But the relative difficulty or ease of detecting cognates among Mesoamerican languages is not really the issue at hand. What can be observed here is that toponyms, when compared across languages, tend to be calques, that is, with equivalent or quasi-equivalent semantic values (the same is true of anthroponyms). What mattered here was meaning, more than sound, and this seems to contrast with what we usually find in European toponymy (and anthroponymy), where there are many examples of phonetic loans, with cognates used for naming the same places (and people) in different languages. There are, of course, exceptions where calques are used. Going over the responses posted here over the last nine months, it looks to me like my initial impressions are reasonable, although the complexity of toponymy in Europe and other regions is illustrated by the examples that have been shared here.
I thank all who have contributed to this discussion, and all who may do so in the future. This is a fascinating topic and evidently much remains to be said.
Chapter Cloud Serpent, King of the Place of the Flowering Tender Ear...
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