Methods of Place-name Study

The essential principles upon which all place-name study must be based were laid down over 50 years ago by Skeat. The student must first make as wide a collection as possible of the early forms of each name and then deal with the special problems before him in the light of a thorough knowledge of the history of English sounds from the earliest times to the present day. But his assertion that the phonetic laws governing the history of place-names were precisely the same as those governing the history of other words needs some modification. The etymologist deals with words which have retained a definite meaning throughout their life. They may, and do, change in spelling and in pronunciation, but the speed and the extent of these changes are checked by the need for mutual understanding. Writer and reader, speaker and hearer must interpret the words and meaning in the same way. The place-name student, on the other hand, is dealing with names which in the wear and tear of everyday speech have lost the meaning which they originally had and have become mere unintelligible names, subject for still further centuries to the inevitable processes of phonetic change, unchecked by the need to preserve the meaning, changes often increased by deliberate attempts to give the name some semblance of sense.