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London's Name
Author(s) -
By Theodora
Publication year - 2016
Publication title -
transactions of the philological society
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.333
H-Index - 26
eISSN - 1467-968X
pISSN - 0079-1636
DOI - 10.1111/1467-968x.12064
Subject(s) - history , celtic languages , settlement (finance) , linguistics , german , syllable , vowel , ancestor , genealogy , scots , wish , literature , ancient history , art , philosophy , archaeology , computer science , payment , world wide web
The present paper was inspired by Richard Coates's 1998 article ‘A new analysis of the name London ’, in which he refutes the traditional derivation of the name from the form Londinium recorded in the Classical sources on the grounds that its Old English ancestor Lunden presupposes a British (that is to say, Celtic) source form *[Lōndonjon] with a back vowel in the second syllable. I wish further to clarify the history of this name in two respects by showing that: (i) the British name must have reached western Germanic dialects prior to West Germanic Consonant Lengthening and thus in all probability prior to the Anglo‐Saxon settlements in England, and: (ii) that * Londonion (with a short [o]) belongs to an identifiable British place‐name type, even though the lexical base lond ‐ remains rather elusive and information on a native settlement is confined to a single historical source, which locates it to the south of the Thames.