by loftar » Fri Jun 19, 2009 8:33 pm
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.
"Object-oriented design is the roman numerals of computing." -- Rob Pike