Renaming Shady Acres

[niltrias]

Now if you don't mind, Shady Acres is plenty Germanic as it is: "Shade" can be traced through Old English into Proto-Germanic and even to Proto-Indoeuropean (skotwos -> skaðwoz -> sceadu -> shade) and cognates with German "Schatten" and Swedish "skugga"; "Acre", in turn, can be traced just as far (hégros -> akraz -> æcer -> acre) and cognates, at least, with Swedish "åker" (and probably also, via Latin, with "agriculture"). The literal Swedish translation, "Skuggåker", would be a fully valid Swedish village name; it sounds so common that it wouldn't surprise me if it even exists.

Maybe it would be possible to translate it into Middle English and halfway back, to make it sound like a more canonical place name, but I'm not sure how that would turn out in reality.

Ah, you beat me to it. As soon as I saw that post I was ready to pounce. Ah well.
But this wouldnt work for bottleneck very well. neck is fine, from old English "hnecca" but the farthest bottle can go is to middle English "Botel" for the unweildy and anachronistic "botelhnecca"
The real problem is that bottle is an import from the Anglo-Normans, which meand it gets traced back to...
wait for it...
latin "butticula"
seriously.
so it would work out from the latin and old English as "Hnecca Butticula" using the romance method instead of the germanic method of noun modification. I know there is a case change in latin, but I cant remember what it is ATM.
I think i will stick with bottleneck. and I LIKE the name Shadyacres, so unless most residents want it changed, im sticking to it.

[loftar]

so it would work out from the latin and old English as "Hnecca Butticula" using the romance method instead of the germanic method of noun modification. I know there is a case change in latin, but I cant remember what it is ATM.

If I am not incorrect in some of my assumptions (I don't know Latin a hundredth as well as I'd like to), "butticula" should be feminine, 1st decl., and the case should be the genitive, leading to "Hnecca Butticulae". But yeah, it's kind of a frankenword, and it certainly doesn't sound like a reasonable place name.

For the record, I, too, quite like the name Shadyacres (particularly when written together, yes; as Germanic word synthesis was meant to be), and I encourage the use of it. :)

[Hamel]

Ah, you beat me to it. As soon as I saw that post I was ready to pounce. Ah well.
But this wouldnt work for bottleneck very well. neck is fine, from old English "hnecca" but the farthest bottle can go is to middle English "Botel" for the unweildy and anachronistic "botelhnecca"
The real problem is that bottle is an import from the Anglo-Normans, which meand it gets traced back to...
wait for it...
latin "butticula"
seriously.
so it would work out from the latin and old English as "Hnecca Butticula" using the romance method instead of the germanic method of noun modification. I know there is a case change in latin, but I cant remember what it is ATM.
I think i will stick with bottleneck. and I LIKE the name Shadyacres, so unless most residents want it changed, im sticking to it.

If we ever think of renaming Bottleneck, we should call it Shomaderith. Which is DF dwarvish for Bottle-throat. There is no dwarvish word for neck.

[Jfloyd]

Well, I've already been using the name Blue Haven, since the people who did like the name change chose that.
Ironwyn would have been nice too...

[niltrias]

so it would work out from the latin and old English as "Hnecca Butticula" using the romance method instead of the germanic method of noun modification. I know there is a case change in latin, but I cant remember what it is ATM.

If I am not incorrect in some of my assumptions (I don't know Latin a hundredth as well as I'd like to), "butticula" should be feminine, 1st decl., and the case should be the genitive, leading to "Hnecca Butticulae". But yeah, it's kind of a frankenword, and it certainly doesn't sound like a reasonable place name.

For the record, I, too, quite like the name Shadyacres (particularly when written together, yes; as Germanic word synthesis was meant to be), and I encourage the use of it.

Yep, i did say that i have forgotten the case/declension system of Latin. About all I have left is the scene from the life of Brian, where Brian is forced to correct "Romans go home". That I can recite almost word for word. But anyway, the my point was just to show the slippery slope of trying to slide current English names back to their roots...awful, awful things are waiting back there.
I studied linguistics in Uni, which was quite a ways back for me. Normally, my posts in forums are quite well capitalized and punctuated, but this game has induced my to play on my server, so I can use a mouse, and my server was never really set up for typing, so I have this frankenboard of a keyboard that looks like a western keyboard but is mapped like a Japanese keyboard. I can never find the right keys.
Edit -- by the way, you said it should be feminine...is this a reference to Romans using feminine place names, like Europa, Roma, etc? But if Butticulae is the modifier, and Hnecca is the main word, shouldnt the modifier match the gender of of the noun it is modifying? Unless old English had a gender system, which I seem to remember something about. I think Ive forgotten too much...gonna go dust off some textbooks and come back.

[loftar]

by the way, you said it should be feminine...is this a reference to Romans using feminine place names, like Europa, Roma, etc?

No, it was rather that I checked out the Latin diminutive suffices, and "-cula" seemed to be the suffix for feminine nouns of the first declension (as opposed to, for example, "-culus" for masculine nouns like "homunculus").

But if Butticulae is the modifier, and Hnecca is the main word, shouldnt the modifier match the gender of of the noun it is modifying?

I don't think so. Again, I really don't know my Latin even a fraction as well as I'd like to, but normally only adjectives and adjectivized words (like verb participles) are conjugated according to the gender of the word they modify. This, on the other hand, is a noun in the genitive case, quite simply. Certainly, it is that way in Germanic languages at least, and I don't think that the Romance languages differ in that aspect.

Unless old English had a gender system, which I seem to remember something about.

It most definitely did -- it didn't stem from Old Norse for nothing. Aah, things were better in ðe olde dayes. :D

[niltrias]

Hmm. I know that Old Norse had a gender system, which survives in most Germanic languages, but I was under the impression that one of the marks of the transition from Old Norse to Old English was the loss of the gender system. Middle English later completed the loss, but didnt Old English start the change? The refined article use that remains today was a result of the influx of Anglo-Normans after 1066, but I believe that the loss of gender-related articles was almost complete by the time of the conquest...hence the removal of gender from words stemming from the Anglo-Norman. A lot of the words still retained their gender-based FORMS from the old system, but I fairly sure it had become more a matter of pronunciation than anything else.
If Im wrong on this, Id like to get a source, if you have the time. I believe you, but id like to read that book.
For the last 6 years Ive been concentrating on Altaic languages (especially Japanese), so Ive forgotten quite a bit about the Indo-Aryan group. I probably screwed up somewhere.
BTW, just as a point of curiosity, does Swedish have a subjunctive mood? The English subjunctive is a personal pet peeve, and Im kinda curious about what other Germanic languages use it, and to what extent. I know German uses it quite a bit.

[loftar]

Hmm. I know that Old Norse had a gender system, which survives in most Germanic languages, but I was under the impression that one of the marks of the transition from Old Norse to Old English was the loss of the gender system. Middle English later completed the loss, but didnt Old English start the change? The refined article use that remains today was a result of the influx of Anglo-Normans after 1066, but I believe that the loss of gender-related articles was almost complete by the time of the conquest...hence the removal of gender from words stemming from the Anglo-Norman. A lot of the words still retained their gender-based FORMS from the old system, but I fairly sure it had become more a matter of pronunciation than anything else.
If Im wrong on this, Id like to get a source, if you have the time. I believe you, but id like to read that book.

Wikipedia hath spoken: "Old English had a system of grammatical gender similar to that of for example Modern German and French [...] Within the noun phrase, determiners and adjectives showed gender inflection in agreement with the noun." And, of course, if Wikipedia says it, it has to be true. :)

Unfortunately, I cannot claim to have studied it in detail; in particular, I haven't actually read much Old English at all. Reading the Wycliffe translation of the Bible, on the other hand, it seems clear that English had lost any meaningful sense of gender; though that is late 14th century and thus very well into Middle English.

For the last 6 years Ive been concentrating on Altaic languages (especially Japanese), so Ive forgotten quite a bit about the Indo-Aryan group.

Do let me remind you that the hypothesis that Japanese is an Altaic language is quite controversial (and so even the existence of an Altaic language family to begin with). I can't say I have any opinion of my own in the issue, but what would the Wikipedia moderators say if we don't keep the NPOV? ;)
For the record, I've studied quite a bit of Japanese myself in the last 6 years -- mainly practical studies through the excessive watching of anime. :)

(Also, judging by the context, don't you mean Indo-European?)

BTW, just as a point of curiosity, does Swedish have a subjunctive mood? The English subjunctive is a personal pet peeve, and Im kinda curious about what other Germanic languages use it, and to what extent. I know German uses it quite a bit.

It most certainly does (though we usually use the name "conjunctive" rather than "subjunctive") -- both the present and past subjunctives -- but unfortunately it has seen a steep decline in use over the latest decades. It has long been a pet peeve of mine, as well. I would guess that the main reason for the decline of the past subjunctive is the fact that it is morphologically based on the old indicative, past, plural verb stems, which are not used at all today (modern Swedish verbs are not inflected for person).

[niltrias]

Ah, that wikipedia page looks reasonable enough. I cant read OE either, although I have read Chaucer in the original. (As part of a university class). Pretty much same time as the Wycliffe Bible, about 300 years into ME.

As far as the Altaic language group being controversial, I am aware of that. As it happens, my professor was quite pro-Altaic theory, so Ive sort of inherited that point of view. I did quite a few research papers on the Altaic languages, and while I don't think there is enough evidence to prove their relation, I would say that there is a substantial amount of evidence pointing that way. A lot of the dispute is based not so much on whether they are functionally similar or not, but whether the definition of a family should be based on organic or functional relationship. Or both.
To put it another way, it certainly seems that while they are structurally similar enough that they can definitely but put into a class together, but not nearly enough evidence showing that they actually evolved from each other.

Indo-Aryan -- My bad. As I mentioned, I have forgotten quite a bit. I was thinking that Indo-Aryan was the larger class and Indo-European was the subset, but I got it backwards. Yep, I meant Indo-European.

Japanese -- Mine comes mainly from reading documents and contracts. But I watch some anime too, on occasion.