Literal meanings of English counties - eviltoast
    • Skua@kbin.earth
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      23
      ·
      2 months ago

      For those wondering why these borders don’t match up: England’s county system is actually the butchered remains of several iterations stitched together in a manner that would appal Dr Frankenstein. This image shows the historic counties, but those basically only exist for cultural reasons today and have not been used for governance since the 70s. They don’t quite match the post - see, for example, Yorkshire being one massive thing in this image but split into four in the post. Even though one of the four is called “east third”. The post’s border also don’t match the modern counties though, so I’m not quite sure what exactly is being shown, but it could be older borders or just whichever borders had the most interesting set of names

      • merde alors@sh.itjust.works
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        2
        ·
        edit-2
        2 months ago

        it’s strange to see that, Cornwall means horn of the foreigners or Britons and that the Britons were considered as foreigners on their ancestral lands 🤷

        The names “Wales” and “Welsh” are modern descendants of the Anglo-Saxon word wealh, a descendant of the Proto-Germanic word walhaz, which was derived from the name of the Gaulish people known to the Romans as Volcae and which came to refer indiscriminately to inhabitants of the Roman Empire. The Old English-speaking Anglo-Saxons came to use the term to refer to the Britons in particular. As the Britons’ territories shrank, the term came ultimately to be applied to a smaller group of people, and the plural form of Wealh, Wēalas, evolved into the name for the territory that best maintained cultural continuity with pre-Anglo-Saxon Britain: Wales.