A visual exploration of the spatial patterns in endings of German town names | Hacker News Reader

A visual exploration of the spatial patterns in endings of German town names

truth-and-beauty.net

138 pointsingve27 comments

The german ZEIT magazine publishes entertaining, beautifully designed maps of Germany with a plethora of subjects in their "ZEIT Magazin"; the maps are also online at http://www.zeit.de/serie/deutschlandkarte

Here's one that shows cities whose names are verbs: http://www.zeit.de/zeit-magazin/2014/52/staedtenamen-verben-... and here's a map that shows cities whose names are used for american cities: https://ssl.zeit.de/images.zeit.de/lebensart/2013-02/d-karte...

The most often used German townsname in the US seems to be Hanover/Hannover - which is interesting, as it is a rather mid-sized city of half a million. Though the reason for this is most likely that it's also the name of the duchy and later kingdom of Hanover which was in a personal union with England from 1714 to 1837. Apparently, quite a number of soldiers from the state of Hanover (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Germans_in_the_American_Revolu...) were sent to the US to fight against the American revolutionaries - some of them probably stayed on and founded these cities. Well, obviously much more complex, but might be one reason for the higher than expected number of towns named Han(n)over in the US.

Similarly there are a lot of US towns named Lafayette, Fayette, or Fayetteville, after the marquis de Lafayette, who fought for the US in the American Revolution.

Also interesting here is a common American use of the place name La Grange/Lagrange being a reference to Lafeyette's home castle (as opposed to the mathematician from whom we get such concepts as Lagrange Points).

I did this too, except in with less detail (ie theirs is better) and with less focus on germany

http://blog.mclemon.io/placenames-slash-maps-search-mashup

http://places.mclemon.io

Nice! After the original post I was wondering how that would look for my town and it seems I'm located in the highest concentration of place ending with 'ies' and it's a pretty small area.

Consider adding -ham to the list, that seems to be an ending predominant in eastern bavaria. Very interesting stuff. You can nicely see those places which were founded by slavs, ages ago (-roda and -ow, among others, if I remember correctly).

-itz too, I think

To clarify, I was saying "-itz" was one of the interesting slavic suffixes, not that it's missing from the linked page. In fact it's quite nicely highlighted there, and is a nice example of the suffixes which appear to be more prevalent in the former DDR.

This is some nice work. Keep it up!

I see the code is available but as well ask before taking a look - is there much effort to remap for different geographies and languages?

A UK version, showing Norse names (which famously show a very clear divide): http://www.britishmuseum.org/whats_on/past_exhibitions/2014/...

And for just England, http://kepn.nottingham.ac.uk/, dividing by source language.

While this doesn't split by toponymy, if you click on the towns, you'll find the toponyms explained.

Note the locality of the places with the "-ow" endings which point to the probable Slavic origins. That map has probably the clearest "signal" of all of them.

Quite some cool project. Coming from Germany and having relocated from south-east to northern Germany, I discovered quite some nice things there.

The proximity of -ich to Netherlands suggests it may be the closest to the Dutch -wick and the English -wich.

From a Norwegian perspective the Dutch word Wick sounds like the Norwegian word Vik or cove, bay, inlet in English. If you look at the coastal location of these towns that link seems to make some sense.

> the Dutch word Wick

Wick is not a word that I know of, do you mean Wijk (neighborhood)? Like Noordwijk en Katwijk? Because that's almost certainly not related to 'bay'. Many coastal towns are named something with a 'dam' however (Amsterdam, Rotterdam, Monnikedam).

Yep, I meant wijk. Not sure what happened there! wick is also used in English.

I keep thinking that this is the origin for Vikings. I've pondered over this for ages since half of me comes from the Danish town of Vig; inland now but only after Sidinge fjord was drained for farming.

No, -ich is not related to -wijk or -wich.

There are cognate suffixes in the German-speaking areas (ending on -wyk, -wik, -wig, etc.) but -ich is not one of them. German -ich is equivalent to -ik in Dutch-speaking areas.

There exists no -wick ending in Dutch city names, there is however a common ending -wijk. 'Wijk' translates to neighborhood.

This should be expanded to include the other majority German-speaking countries, Austria and Switzerland.

And even to Alsace/Elsass imo as it also has a lot of towns ending in -heim, -haus, -hausen, etc.

This has also been done for Italy, by Stefano Maggiolo: http://blog.poormansmath.net/on-the-distribution-of-italian-...

This is the tool the viusalisations are made with: http://ssz.fr/places/

You can pick different countries and run your own expressions against them.

-ingen would also be interesting, Baden-Württemberg is full of those.

Here is a visualisation comparing the "ingen" towns of Baden-Württemberg and the "ing" towns of Bavaria:

http://ssz.fr/places/?de#ingen$/ing$/

"-ow" implies "Poland was here?"

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