Londinium London ought to be the easiest of all place names to explain. It is amply attested in Roman times as Londinium and subsequently evolved through various spellings, including some beginning with Lund-, like the modern pronunciation. Yet many linguists perceive London as a big problem. Actually London is dead easy to explain. It became an administrative capital, transport hub, and major port only when the Romans imposed unity on the lowland zone of Britain. Before then, trade with the Continent passed mainly through ports in East Anglia or on the south coast. Almost no archaeological evidence exists for much settlement before Roman times. Three types of people created London: Roman administrators, presumably speaking Latin; merchants, presumably speaking forms of early Germanic and “Gaulish” (whatever that was); and locals speaking “British” (whatever that was). Judging by other port cities around the word, ancient London would have been a vibrant, polyglot place, but its name would have been created by a few top people, not by the waterside riff-raff. The location of London was dictated by geography. The first place where the Thames could be forded was Tamesa, later Thorney Island, now Westminster. Nowadays the Thames estuary has concrete river banks and you have to go downstream beyond Tilbury and Gravesend to get even a hint of the noisome marshes that flanked almost all of the river’s edge in Roman times. Of course people exploited the high biological productivity of wetlands, but they could not live close to the river without suffering disastrous floods like those at Canvey Island and Sheppey in 1953, and possibly malaria too. Londinium was founded in a typically Roman location, by the side of a big river where boats could come and go on a high tide, and also nestled beside smaller tributary streams. This is completely different from native British habits, of dispersed farms around local hill forts or gathering places. To amplify a previous point, distinctive place names are generally created by some kind of authority: local government, landlord, monastery, property developer, etc. Ordinary peasants generally use a very basic name, such as “the river”. For example, residents of the Isle of Wight invariably speak of “the Island”. And of course the Romans later dignified Londinium as Augusta. Many of the Roman soldiers in Britain, and the traders who supplied them, came from around the lower Rhine, where they would have grown up speaking languages ancestral to modern Dutch, Frisian, Flemish, Low German, etc. To them, Londinium was just ‘land’, the place to get out of a ship with dry feet because a timber wharf had been built at the river’s edge. The ending –inium is fairly common and unremarkable in Latin, but possibly it conveys a sense of plurality and abstractness – ‘landings’. This raises a vexed question: the origin of the word land. Standard books cite PIE *lendh- ‘open land’, which developed into English lawn as well as land, and gave rise to Celtic words for ‘enclosure, church’ such as llan so prolific in Wales. However, the origin may lie deeper, even in some pre-Indo-European substrate language left over from Doggerland. Both Old English and Old Frisian had spellings lond; advanced linguists discuss why (e.g. here). One final geographical point. Londinium had a twin, at Glevum (modern Gloucester), where Latin glaeba ‘land, soil’ would fit the first fordable place of the Severn estuary. Many cities grew up at analogous locations, but often they took names from the river, so that Tameia (Perth) was actually a twin of Tamesa. The problem with this argument is that many linguists have been brought up to believe that early names were created in Celtic. One can see this particularly clearly in Coates (1998): “Evidently the language of the people from whom the Romans took the name was British Celtic”. Notice that word “evidently”: actually he supplied no evidence whatsoever and was simply stating an article of faith. [Coates, R (1998) ‘A New Explanation of the Name of London’. Trans. Philological Society 96, 203-229.] As this website documents at length, there are strikingly few early British names that have their clearest parallels in Celtic languages. Almost every name can be explained best (in the sense of fitting its geography and/or history) with the aid of dictionaries of Latin and Greek, or of general proto-Indo-European (where it is debatable whether the actual languages of name creation belonged to soldiers and sailors from around the Empire, or to the local elite). Inside the M25 there appears to be not a single modern or ancient place name that cogently demands a Celtic explanation. Possibly the best candidate for an exception is Penge, but other names, such as Cray, are “Celtic” only by false logic. In fact, as Coates himself has documented, very few places in the south-east of England have promising Celtic etymologies. Most of those collapse upon careful examination. Someone needs to go through the whole faith-based edifice of the historical phonology of ancient British speech, to see how much can be salvaged from all the false assumptions and circular logic. As an example of the problem, Coates (1998) approvingly cited the view of Rivet and Smith (1979) that the Ravenna Cosmography “is notoriously full of problematic readings and gross errors”. That is just plain wrong: the Cosmography is actually at least as reliable as other ancient sources and has been gravely underestimated. Many recorded early names have been given an elaborate phonological analysis based upon an assumption that those names were used by people who grew up speaking Celtic or Latin. Those analyses typically ignore the possibility that the name creators and users actually spoke Germanic (or Greek, or Ligurian, or some more general kind of “Old European”). In many cases the assumed original meanings of those names are so terrible (in terms of geography) that it is hard not to laugh, if you have not been indoctrinated with Celtic linguistics. So let’s not laugh at the suggestion by Coates (1998) that Londinium came from *Plowonid- on-jon, meaning ‘unfordable river’ or perhaps ‘overflowing river’. He deserves credit for carefully setting out the recorded ancient forms of London’s name and for explaining how that hypothetical early form might have evolved phonetically. His article seems not to be available on the web, so here is the key piece of text: Effect of general absence of /p/ in Celtic *Lowonid-on-jon Loss of */i/ - see below *Lowond-on-jon IE */ow/ > late British/Brittonic */o:/ *Lōond-on-jon Presumable absorption of short */o/ into long */o:/ *Lōnd-on-jon British third-century raising *Lūnd-on-jon Other late British/Brittonic changes *Lūndein or Lūndyn Someone needs to apply the same sort of logic to an original *Landen spoken by merchants and soldiers from the Continent. How might a final N have arisen, for example as plural, verb, participle, etc? What would the vowel (A, O, U, or whatever) have sounded like? How has the vowel represented in modern English by AW, or in modern Danish or Walloon by Å, been handled over the centuries?

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