so a month ago or so there was a tongue-in-cheek thread here about English names for subdistricts in Vilnius. I decided (It’s exam season so I’m procrasinating) to do a slightly more serious take on this by using actual suffixes and prefixes one would find in english place-names.
2 Place-names in particular gave me a bit of a headache, Žvėrynas and Žirmūnai.
Žvėrynas, literally a menagerie, has a perfect equivalent in german speaking countries – tiergarten. Žvėrynas is also a fairly old place-name, so I thought it’d be fair to go back to middle english and use Rother (partially derived from o.e. deor) + yard, making Rotheryard, but I decided to settle for menagerie simply because it is the literal translation.
Žirmūnai was also difficult since the etymology is unknown, so I decided to use Tuskulėnai manor as a reference, since it has a history of using the latin name Tusculanum.
New Vilnia sounds like a 1600’s Lithuanian colony in the Caribbean just south from New Courland, not gonna lie.
tuscalanum is latin
That’s really interesting and huge kudos for sharing all the research with us!
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so a month ago or so there was a tongue-in-cheek thread here about English names for subdistricts in Vilnius. I decided (It’s exam season so I’m procrasinating) to do a slightly more serious take on this by using actual suffixes and prefixes one would find in english place-names.
2 Place-names in particular gave me a bit of a headache, Žvėrynas and Žirmūnai.
Žvėrynas, literally a menagerie, has a perfect equivalent in german speaking countries – tiergarten. Žvėrynas is also a fairly old place-name, so I thought it’d be fair to go back to middle english and use Rother (partially derived from o.e. deor) + yard, making Rotheryard, but I decided to settle for menagerie simply because it is the literal translation.
Žirmūnai was also difficult since the etymology is unknown, so I decided to use Tuskulėnai manor as a reference, since it has a history of using the latin name Tusculanum.
New Vilnia sounds like a 1600’s Lithuanian colony in the Caribbean just south from New Courland, not gonna lie.
tuscalanum is latin
That’s really interesting and huge kudos for sharing all the research with us!
Any chance you can also do Kaunas? 😀
Žvėrynas – ZOO
Šnipiškės – SNOUTS
Šeškinė – FERRETS