River rivers
How river names are as exciting as ditchwater
The River Trent is lovely, I know because I have walked on it for 18 years.
Brian Clough
The names of rivers are among the most ancient of toponyms (placenames), because the rivers themselves are ancient. A river’s course may change or be diverted – the Huang He (Yellow River) has flooded and changed course by hundreds of miles in just the last two thousand years, earning it the nickname ‘China’s Sorrow’ – but rivers will often live for hundreds of millions of years. Very often river names are passed down, even when there are mass population shifts and speakers of different languages occupy lands and others are displaced. Toponyms that describe bodies of water – hydronyms < Greek ὕδρω (hydro) ‘water’ + ὄνομα (onoma) ‘name’ – seem to be from the ‘call a spade a spade’ school of naming conventions, often meaning little more than ‘river’, ‘wet’ or ‘water’ in the surviving name. This also explains why so many rivers share the same or similar names: there are at least nine River Avons (all literally ‘River River’) in the UK, including the Bristol Avon and the Warwickshire Avon, sometimes also known as Shakespeare’s Avon because it runs through the bard’s hometown of Stratford. Avon is a descendant of *aβon ‘river’, from the Proto-Brythonic Celtic language spoken across Britain prior to the Roman invasion. As well as avon, *aβon gives us the name for ‘river’ in Modern Welsh afon and Breton aven.
While some rivers change their name at different points along their course – the Katsura River, which flows through Kyoto, starts off startlingly as the Ōi, and then has a small stretch as the Hozu before becoming the Katsuru for the rest of its lower course – it is perhaps surprising that so many do not and that their names have stayed relatively unaltered. This is particularly true of large rivers, which are more conservative linguistically than smaller rivers and streams, although obviously river names do vary across languages (the Danube is Donau (German), Dunaj (Slovak), Duna (Hungarian), Dunav/Дунав in Croatian, Serbian and Bulgarian, Dunărea in Romanian and finally Дунай (dunaj) in Ukrainian as it tips into the Black Sea). People who move into an area may retain the existing hydronyms of earlier inhabitants as handy geographical markers that are more useful and concrete than yet another river with a generic ‘river’ or ‘water’ name. Hence, four out of six of the longest rivers in the USA bear native American names rather than names given by European settlers: Missouri, from Miami wimihsoorita ‘(river of} people of the dugout canoes’, Mississippi, from Anishinaabe Misi-ziibi ‘great river’, Yukon from Gwich’in chųų gąįį han ‘white-water river’ and Arkansas, from Algonquian ‘(river of) the south wind people’. The exceptions are the Rio Grande ‘big river’ and Colorado ‘reddish-coloured river’, named by Spanish colonists lacking in inspiration.
Other major rivers whose names mean ‘river’ include the Don, Dniester, Dnieper, Donets and Danube – all based on the Proto-Indo-European root *danu- ‘river, river goddess’, daughter of the older root dʰenh meaning ‘set in motion, flow’. Descendant forms can be found in Sanskrit दानु (dānu) ‘drop of liquid, dew, fluid’, Persian دنیدن (danidan) ‘walk pompously’, Latin fons ‘fountain, spring’, from which we derive font, fount and fountain, and most obviously, Ossetian дон (don) ‘water, river’. The River Don – as well as its tributary the Donets ‘little Don’, which flows through the contested Ukrainian region of the Donbas, an abbreviation of Донецький басейн (Doneckyj basejn) ‘Donets Basin’ – is located in the Pontic-Caspian steppe, generally accepted as the most likely homeland of the Proto-Indo-Europeans. The Don empties, like the Danube, Dniester and Dnieper, into the Black Sea, indicating that the common ancestor of all of these major river names is very old indeed. While Danube is an extended form of *danu- via Proto-Celtic *danowyos ‘river’, Dniester is from Sarmatian dānu nazdya ‘the close river’ in opposition to Dnieper, from Sarmatian dānu apara ‘the farther river’.
Sarmatian and Ossetian are both Eastern Iranic languages of the Scythian cultures that flourished in the Pontic-Caspian region, but there are other Dons much closer to home. The city of Aberdeen was originally called Aberdon < Scottish Gaelic aber ‘river mouth’ + Don and was located at the mouth of the River Don, not, as may have been expected, the nearby Dee (Aberdeen Football Club is also nicknamed The Dons). The other major Don in the UK is in Yorkshire and passes through the cities of Sheffield and Doncaster < Don + Old English cæster ‘fort’ on its way to joining the Ouse, just before it empties into the Humber estuary. All of these rivers may have been sacred because the rivers themselves were deified in the religions of the Indo-Europeans and their early descendants. The Hindu goddess Danu, for example, who appears in the Rigveda, the oldest Vedic Sanskrit text, is embodied in the primeval waters of rivers. Scholars have bickered about the origin of the name of the Irish goddess Danu or Anu for well over a century, but the similarity between the name of the Hindu goddess and the Irish one is unlikely to be coincidental. Danu or Anu is certainly associated with fertility – the Paps of Anu in County Kerry are a pair of breast-shaped hills with nipples made of cairns on each summit. Likewise, the Welsh deity Dôn, who appears (without a specific gender) in the tales of the Mabinogion may also originally have been a mother goddess, and even though medieval Welsh antiquarians assumed Dôn was male, the etymological evidence suggests that they’ve got this tits up.
The River Elbe is yet another ‘River River’, Elbe being the High German descendant of Proto-Germanic *albi ‘river’, the source of Scandinavian words for ‘river’, such as Icelandic elfur Norwegian elv and Swedish älv. Other hydronyms do their best to rival River River as expressions of the blindingly obvious. Volga means ’wetness, damp’ from Proto-Slavic *volga 'wetness, moisture', cf. Bulgarian and Serbian влага (vlaga) ‘moisture’ and Slovak vlaha ‘dampness’; the British rivers Thames, Tamar, Tame, Team and Taff all stem from the Proto-Indo-European root *temh- ‘to be dark’ and the rivers Jizera (Czech Republic), Isère and Oise (France), Ésera (Spain), Isar (Germany) and Aire (UK) all mean ‘fast-flowing’ from Proto-Indo-European *iseros ‘vigorous, quick’. On that note, this post will meander (from a winding Anatolian river known as Menderes in Turkish and Μαίανδρος (Maíandros) in Greek, names which probably descend from a Semitic word meaning ‘intestine’ – they do twist and turn a lot) to a close.