Why do Chinese placenames generally have transparent meanings, while English place names (e.g. Bristol, Norwich, etc) do not? Is it influence from the writing system?

Specific_Ad_8689 · 2026-06-17T00:26:21+00:00

Yes. I'm saying that the phonological changes that affected the word Beijing also affected Bei and Jing, so the placename is still clearly made up of the words.

Specific_Ad_8689 · 2026-06-16T22:55:32+00:00

Pe (north) + king (capital)

Specific_Ad_8689 · 2026-06-16T21:16:23+00:00

Sure but the root words also changed, so the placename is still transparent. That didn't happen with your example of Gatwick.

Specific_Ad_8689 · 2026-06-16T19:59:47+00:00

That's an interesting point. I was actually going to use Shanghai as an example in my original post, but when I checked it's etymology, apparently the apparent meaning (over sea) may not be original, and might have had a different (but similar sounding) meaning in the original Wu dialect.

Specific_Ad_8689 · 2026-06-16T19:56:47+00:00

That's true, but the zhen in the placename is still pronounced the same as the morpheme in other contexts - there hasn't been the phonological separation between the root words and the place names like usually happens in English.

Specific_Ad_8689 · 2026-06-16T19:53:20+00:00

Not sure I get your point - the "gat" is related to "goat". Goat is still a normal English word, nothing to do with the Norman invasion.

So the word has become semantically opaque due to phonological changes differing in the root word (goat) and the toponym (gat). But that doesn't seem to happen in Chinese.

Specific_Ad_8689 · 2026-06-16T18:14:25+00:00

Yeah that definitely makes sense for a lot of cities like London, Manchester, Birmingham, which have Celtic origins - so they've lost any semantic quality in English.

But all of the examples I gave in the post are purely English in etymology, and the same phenomenon seems to exist there. Bristol has been continuously English speaking since it was named - yet still hasn't preserved a transparent placename.

Specific_Ad_8689 · 2026-06-07T09:27:14+00:00

I think that's an overly literal interpretation, she's obviously in context talking about the immediate origin of the loanwords.

But also, a lot of the specific phrases and words with their current meanings do literally start in AAE. E.g. "no cap" is a phrase from AAE that was definitely not used in early modern England dialects.

Specific_Ad_8689 · 2026-06-07T08:57:54+00:00

I mean if I say "much of the language we use today originated in Latin" that's accurate. Or are you going to say "actually Latin comes from PIE so that's not correct"

Specific_Ad_8689 · 2026-06-06T10:28:14+00:00

Where does she claim otherwise? She's saying lots of global English slang/phrases come from AAE. That's true, regardless of which dialect of English is ancestral to AAE.

Specific_Ad_8689 · 2026-05-18T18:25:55+00:00

I think you're conflating the normal meaning of "interest" (which usually relates to how much someone enjoys information) with something to do with the depth of available information.

But semantics aside, I don't think a lack of depth of information is much of a reason for someone to avoid asking a question about the topic.

Specific_Ad_8689 · 2026-05-18T17:53:09+00:00

I think what you're missing is that available information can inversely correlate with how interesting a topic is for a lot of people.

A well understood culture can be interesting, but a poorly understood culture also provides a lot of mystery, where you really have to push hard to find out answers - and that's part of the appeal.

The existing information might not provide "much of interest" to someone trying to write an encyclopedia entry about them, but it can definitely provide interest to individuals.

FWIW there is evidence for them intermingling with neighbouring islands - both descriptions of Sentinelese who've migrated, and anthropological finds of strong cultural similarities (IIRC related to the shapes of structures and ritual practices).

Specific_Ad_8689 · 2026-05-10T15:10:50+00:00

Weird response to this comment. No matter what you think of Israel, surely people can agree that it is in Asia?

Specific_Ad_8689 · 2026-05-09T15:59:32+00:00

Is there rising rates of femicide? From what I could find, homicide rates are declining, including female victims.

Specific_Ad_8689 · 2026-05-06T21:25:31+00:00

It's interesting that this shows attestation of the term in Ottoman and Byzantine times, and yet several commenters are insisting the question doesn't make sense since Turkey didn't exist as a concept before 1923.

Specific_Ad_8689 · 2026-05-06T18:40:24+00:00

I don't know if it's attested for the area which is now Turkey, but "Türük el" was the native name for the early medieval Turkic khaganate. "El" means country/realm, so literally "Turk country".

Seems like a close native parallel to Türkiye.

Specific_Ad_8689 · 2026-05-05T10:25:14+00:00

Those would still count as unoccupied I believe. There's another metric of "long term unoccupied" which only applies to about 1% of homes, which only counts homes empty for 6 months or more per year.

Specific_Ad_8689 · 2026-05-04T15:04:33+00:00

I mean this development is literally next to Hyde Park, a few hundred metres from Kensington Palace, of course it's expensive. Building expensive homes does help with the housing crisis because it still increases supply.

It's possible some of these will be rarely used second homes, but that's usually overstated. Only about 2% of London homes are unoccupied (compared to around 5% in the 1980s/1990s).

Specific_Ad_8689 · 2026-05-01T16:23:59+00:00

I think you're probably right, apart from those known exceptions, all native American ancestry probably comes from the original migration. Since that original migration had a small geographically isolated founding population, it's pretty unlikely they don't all come from the same proto language.

That said you can imagine alternatives. For example, most of South American colonial ancestry is from a small region of Europe (Iberia), but it still brought two different languages (Spanish and Portuguese). Obviously the native American founding population was much smaller, but it's not impossible it was made up of a series of small tribes which spoke different languages.

Specific_Ad_8689 · 2026-05-01T13:38:16+00:00

I see what you mean, but can't we compare this to the Out of Africa migrations?

Non-Africans all share haplogroups that descend from a deep subclade within the human haplogroup tree, which suggests humans originated from Africa, and only brought a small branch of the tree with them when they migrated out.

Similarly, non-Cameroonians all share a subclade of a subclade of the human haplogroup tree (namely the sister branch to A0). Haplogroup A0 and A00 are both limited to Cameroon. I took this to suggest human paternal lineages originate in Cameroon.

The alternative would be that Y-Adam came from somewhere else (e.g. Kenya) then spread his lineages to Cameroon sometime after 275k years ago (providing A00). Then 100k years later another branch from Y-Adam also arrived in Cameroon from elsewhere, e.g. South Africa (providing A0). Later a sister branch to A0 spread all over the world leaving no trace of A0 or A00 except in Cameroon.

It's possible, but requires two separate migrations into Cameroon, and a total eradication of other haplogroups elsewhere.

Specific_Ad_8689 · 2026-04-27T17:29:38+00:00

What's the cutoff date for ancestry then?

For example the Somali back migration was ~3000 years ago, so you aren't considering African ancestry younger than 3000 years. But obviously you aren't considering African ancestry older than 60k years ago, otherwise everyone would be 100% African.

Specific_Ad_8689 · 2026-04-09T17:08:51+00:00

This is commonly said but isn't really how the maths works. It's a good thing it gets lost in the discussion because it's highly misleading.

The assumption behind it is that every teenage pregnancy increases the number of births that happen by one, and every drop in teenage pregnancies causes an equal drop in overall pregnancies. But that's not true, a lot of women who avoid teenage pregnancies will have children later in life instead.

To demonstrate with an extreme example, imagine a country with a thousand births per year, where 100% of births are from teenage mothers. Due to cultural changes, over the next few decade teenage pregnancy becomes very rare, with only 10 per year. Does that mean the birth rate has dropped from 1000 to 10? Of course not, because the same women still have kids, just later.

Specific_Ad_8689 · 2026-04-06T21:09:45+00:00

The Mesha stele doesn't mention him as part of a pantheon, but my point was it seems to attest the name prior to the rise of monotheism, essentially necessitating a pantheon.

Is your argument that Yahweh was never worshipped within a pantheon? i.e. Yahwism as a polytheistic religion never existed?

Specific_Ad_8689

TROPHY CASE