
A visual exploration of the spatial patterns in endings of German town names - ingve
http://truth-and-beauty.net/experiments/ach-ingen-zell/
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Tepix
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](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-...](http://www.zeit.de/zeit-
magazin/2014/52/staedtenamen-verben-deutschlandkarte) 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...](https://ssl.zeit.de/images.zeit.de/lebensart/2013-02/d-karte-08/d-karte-08-thickbox.jpg)

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sveme
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...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Germans_in_the_American_Revolution))
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.

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madcaptenor
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.

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WorldMaker
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).

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

[http://places.mclemon.io](http://places.mclemon.io)

~~~
Guillaume86
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.

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sveme
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).

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smcl
-itz too, I think

~~~
smcl
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.

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Sven7
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?

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

And for just England,
[http://kepn.nottingham.ac.uk/](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.

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acqq
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.

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

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

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mtaksrud
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.

~~~
lucb1e
> 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).

~~~
emmelaich
Yep, I meant _wijk_. Not sure what happened there! _wick_ is also used in
English.

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

~~~
titanix2
And even to Alsace/Elsass imo as it also has a lot of towns ending in -heim,
-haus, -hausen, etc.

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madcaptenor
This has also been done for Italy, by Stefano Maggiolo:
[http://blog.poormansmath.net/on-the-distribution-of-
italian-...](http://blog.poormansmath.net/on-the-distribution-of-italian-
towns-by-their-endings/)

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oevi
This is the tool the viusalisations are made with:
[http://ssz.fr/places/](http://ssz.fr/places/)

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

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

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

[http://ssz.fr/places/?de#ingen$/ing$/](http://ssz.fr/places/?de#ingen$/ing$/)

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_-__---
"-ow" implies "Poland was here?"

