I think one of my favorite place names is “Pendle Hill”.
In old England, it was just called something like “Pennul”. This was a compound of a Celtic word “Pen” (meaning “hill”) and the English word “hyll” (meaning “hill”).
Thus the place is literally called “Hill-hill hill.”
This is beautiful
redundant names!
one of my favorites is “the milky way galaxy”, the milky way milky thing.
That is pretty good.
But my favorite part of this one is they did it twice.
Like, the Anglo-Saxons came to Britain and asked the Celts “what do you call that hill?” And the Celts say “oh, that’s a hill.” And the Anglo-Saxons say “Great, so that’s Hill Hill.”
And then centuries later, the modern Britons are like “What do you call that hill? Oh, you call it Hill Hill. So this is the Hill Hill Hill.”
But the best part is they did that twice. There’s another hill in Britain called Bredon Hill. And Bredon comes from the Celtic “bre”, meaning “hill,” and the Old English “down”, meaning “hill” (and still in limited use today, if you think about places called “downs”).
So Bredon Hill is also “Hill-Hill Hill” with a mostly different set of words.
how many layers of linguistic redundancy are you on?
(And you can do even better in fantasy fiction.)