Attempting to uncover the ancient origins of English place names has long kept academics and hobbyists busy, with each name often attracting multiple conflicting ideas. Now, artificial intelligence offers a way to analyse the names鈥� similarities to a host of other European languages, revealing hints about their roots.
at the University of Western Australia took a list of 18,799 place names from England and 84,687 from Ireland, Scotland, Wales, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, France, Germany, the Netherlands and Ancient Rome.
He then used machine learning to analyse similarities between the names in England and those from other places, comparing 263 variables, such as the pattern and location of each letter of the alphabet within the words.
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Dalvean says that rather than studying language and history, as is conventionally done by place-name scholars, relying on pure statistics meant he could uncover fresh information or at least hints pointing to new avenues of research.
After comparing the English names with those from other places, Dalvean found that Harlington is the most archetypically English and would therefore have been chosen by people who spoke the language.
This was closely followed by other places with the same suffix, such as Widdington, Beckington, Didlington and Toddington. On the other end of the spectrum, Anna was the least English of the place names, followed by others such as Lamanva, Laira and Lana.
Dalvean concedes that some place names could predate Indo-European languages and these earlier languages were rarely, if ever, written down, making statistical language analysis difficult or impossible when uncovering the origins of these particular names. Nevertheless, he hopes his study could help to point others towards fruitful avenues of research. 鈥淭he first step is to work out the fundamental language, otherwise you don鈥檛 know what meanings to apply,鈥� he says.
But some place-name academics are sceptical about the AI technique. at the University of Oxford says that analysing the spellings of places will probably reveal little about their original names, as these will have morphed and changed over time. Thousands of years ago, place names wouldn鈥檛 have been written down, possibly until their spellings were recorded by visitors, such as tax collectors or census takers, he says.
鈥淥ne of the fundamental points of place names study is that you can鈥檛 deduce anything from the modern spelling of a name,鈥� says Briggs. 鈥淭he spelling changes over time and it鈥檚 the spelling in the past that matters.鈥�
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