Talk:Aust
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You can read a bit more about the Bob Dylan picture here. http://www.igreens.org.uk/bob_dylan_at_the_old_aust_ferry.htm Jim Thornton. -- —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 128.243.220.42 (talk • contribs) on 15 October 2005.
[edit] Derived from Latin
Currently the article reads: The name of Aust is one of the very few English place-names to be derived from Latin.
Um, aren't there several hundred English place-names derived from Latin?
Ordinary Person (talk) 23:38, 9 December 2008 (UTC)
According to Margaret Gelling (Signposts to the Past, p.35), a leading authority, there are 21 excluding Aust. I think that counts as "very few".Mhockey (talk) 11:38, 2 July 2010 (UTC)
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- Well, I'm certainly less of an expert than she was, but I'm surprised and would be interested to see what she included in her list. There may be a definition issue here - does she mean the whole name, as against those part-derived from Latin? As well as all the placenames with "-chester" or "caer-" (derived from castra), and the various places "Stratton" which derive from strata, to give just two examples, I can think of several local to myself in a relatively non-Romanised area (SE Wales and adjoining), such as Stroat (Glos. - from strata), Bassaleg (from basilica), Magor (from maceria). It's also still debated whether the name Aust derives from Augusta - but I don't deny she's a "reliable source". Ghmyrtle (talk) 12:40, 2 July 2010 (UTC)
- Umm, d'oh, I suppose they're not "English" are they? Put me in the corner with the dunce's cap on - sorry! Ghmyrtle (talk) 17:42, 2 July 2010 (UTC)
Actually, I misread the passage in Gelling's book. 21 is the number of instances she identifies of Latin or part-Latin names known from Roman Britain (as opposed to Latinised British or pre-Celtic names). Of the 21, only two (Cataractoni, now Catterick and Spinis, now Speen) have survived in the modern forms of the names. She deals separately (at pp.66ff and pp.150ff) with Latin words which seem to have been adopted into Anglo-Saxon vocabulary and applied by the Anglo-Saxons as elements of place-names - camp, port, wic (from Latin vicus), ecles (from ecclesia), funta (from fons), ceaster (from castra) and strǣt (from strata). There are certainly many modern place-names with one of those elements, and a few which consist of only those elements (Eccles, Chester, Caister, Caistor, Street and its variants). There are also place-names derived from French words of Latin origin (e.g. Pontefract, Beaulieu), but it would be a stretch to include them. If you include all the place-names in England wholly derived from Latin, there aren't many. Mhockey (talk) 19:13, 2 July 2010 (UTC)
