A vocabulary of landscape — a landscape of words
1190 entries
tautological place name
A tautological place name is one that says the same thing twice or more in different languages, because each wave of newcomers heard the existing name as a proper noun and added their own word for the feature. The Sahara Desert is the desert desert. The River Avon is the river river. Lake Tahoe is lake lake. The Los Angeles River is the the-angels river, with the Spanish article still attached.
Etymology
The term is from the Greek for saying the same thing, and the phenomenon is the ordinary result of language replacement. A newcomer who does not speak the old language cannot tell a description from a name, so afon, the Welsh for river, arrives in English as the name of a specific river and gets river put in front of it.
Notes
The champion is Torpenhow in Cumbria, where torr, penn, and hōh are three words for a hill in three languages stacked in one name; adding Hill, as local usage sometimes does, makes four. Others include the Mississippi River, big-river river, and Bredon Hill, hill hill hill. This lexicon’s hydronym entry covers why river names in particular survive language change and therefore why so many of these exist.