I ran across the surname Longstreeth in the newspaper and was curious as to whether it was the same as the familiar Longstreet. Looking it up in my trusty Словарь английских фамилий = A Dictionary of English Surnames (Moscow, 1986), I found that it was indeed, and it was part of a family of family names whose main entry was under Langstroth, with variants Langstreth, Longstreet, Longstreeth, and Longstreth; they all originate in the Yorkshire toponym Langstrothdale, which this site says “means ‘of the lang strother,’ in other words, ‘the long marsh.'” The OED’s ancient (1919) strother entry (northern. Obsolete.) says it’s of uncertain origin: “Apparently related to Old English stród marsh: compare the place-name Strood.” Wiktionary’s Proto-West Germanic/strōd entry says:
Etymology
Unknown. Suggested to be from Proto-Indo-European *sterh₃- (“to spread; strew”), compare Sanskrit प्रस्तर (prastara, “plain”).
[…]Usage notes
The gender and noun-type is uncertain: Old English shows a neuter a-stem with possible relics of a z-stem (due to Middle English strother); while Old High German has a feminine i-stem, possibly from an original consonant-stem.
And it gives a bunch of descendants, including the placename Strood and the surnames Strother and Strothers; all the common nouns (Dutch stroet, German Strut) appear to be archaic. Thus an ancient word sinks into the swamp…
If WP is to be believed, Stroud in Gloucestershire (close to where several of my relatives live) is of the same origin; it implies that the current pronunciation is a spelling pronunciation, which seems a bit unlikely to me.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stroud
“In March 2021 The Sunday Times named Stroud the best place to live in the UK”: goodness!
It is actually quite nice. If you like that sort of thing. Sunday Times readers probably do.
House prices there are not astronomical, the way they are in the pretty bits south of London, at any rate. And my kid sister had the eminently sensible idea of marrying a man who rebuilds houses for fun because he enjoys it. (He gets on well with my equally practically-capable father.)
Of course, they’ll all be up against the wall come the Revolution.
The Sunday Times named Stroud the best place to live in the UK
“…citing the town’s abundance of green spaces, independent spirit, and high quality of schools.”
“Oh, look. It says here in the Times that Stroud has independent spirit. We should move there.”
Sanskrit प्रस्तर (prastara, “plain”).
простор too? As in, “Мы рождены, чтоб сказку сделать былью”
So this implies that “Longstreet” is an eggcornish reanalysis? Online information about surname etymologies (probably not the most reliable stuff out there even by online-etymology standards …) tends to trace the surname Longstreet to a toponym in Wiltshire, that being a little hamlet in the civil parish of Enford (but the “post town” of Pewsey).* I don’t know the local topography and thus don’t know if the -street in that toponym is plausibly an etymological marsh. And Wiltshire seems an odd spot for a “northern” lexeme, but maybe ditto for Gloucs.
*On the east bank of one branch of the tautologically-named River Avon. Not the famous River Avon but one of the other ones. The one wikipedia says is disambiguated by calling it the “Salisbury Avon” or (even further downstream) “Hampshire Avon.”
but maybe ditto for Gloucs
I’m not convinced that “Stroud” is really of the same origin. The usual mediaeval spelling is “Stroud”, not “Strood(e)”; the former would represent Middle English [stru:d], of which the modern pronunciation would be the perfectly regular outcome.
The spelling-pronunciation idea implied by the WP article is already implausible for anything prior to the twentieth century; for Middle English, I think it’s pretty much impossible.
Stroud is far enough west that a Brythonic source wouldn’t be too much of a stretch, but nothing plausible comes to mind.
Not every toponym has to have a discoverable origin.
I don’t know whether this is relevant, but not too far from Stroud is the town of Frome, which is of course pronounced to rhyme with ‘broom.’ Was there a general change at some point in the spelling/pronunciation of ooh and ow vowels in that part of England?
(The Wiki article says that “In 2019, the BBC ranked Frome as, among places in the UK, having the most difficult name to pronounce.” C’mon now. Compared to Happisburgh? Towcester? etc etc. Maybe they meant it was the most frequently mispronounced.)
There’s a river named Unstrut.
@David L:
The spelling “o” often turns up for expected “u” in cases where the neighbouring letters have a lot of verticle lines in script, as with “m” an “n.” As in “son”, “come.” Disambiguation by mediaeval scribes.
If WP is to be believed, Stroud in Gloucestershire (close to where several of my relatives live) is of the same origin; it implies that the current pronunciation is a spelling pronunciation, which seems a bit unlikely to me.
WP should not be trusted for matters of place name spelling. I live in a hamlet called Sheepscott by some, Sheepscot (lacking a terminal doubled t) by others. WP appends “[sic]” after the version with two ts, kowtowing to the Postal Service convention.
I am tempted to use Pahsheapsakook for a return address, but do not out of respect for my Abnaki[sic] neighbors.
“ The Sheepscot River and area have been known by many names. Perhaps the most common was “Pahsheapsakook.” (You can see the makings of Sheepscot in this early name.) Fanny Hardy Eckstorm breaks it up: pahshe – divided; apak – rocks; ook – water place, channels. It is a place where the river is split up into many rocky channels. Sheepscot is now the universally accepted name. It is an Abnaki name.” source: https://lcnme.com/opinion/columns/newcastle-history-23/
Mind you, according to WP, “Frome” is from a Brythonic frāmā; however, the reference doesn’t look very scholarly.
Cf. Allegheny, Alleghany, and Allegany; Taghkanic, Taconic, and Taughannock; and Hoosic, Hoosac, and Hoosick.
FWIW, there’s a good handful of Norw. toponyms with strut-. Four of them are farm names, which O. Rygh derive from strut m. “spout (of a vessel); snout”, used either for a narrow bay or for a protruding point or hill. Judging from the map, that works well for the farms, and most of the other places too, but there are a couple left that doesn’t seem to fit either option and might just fit “marsh”.
Ah: this river Frome, whose name is supposed to be of the same origin (though hardly from “the Old British word ffraw“, as WP puts it, that being Modern Welsh rather than any sort of Old British)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/River_Frome,_Somerset
turns up spelt as “From” in a Latin text from 701. That makes sense: the form borrowed by Old English would in fact have been something like *frɔ:β̃, so you’d expect Old English Frōm, not *Frām, and a modern English “goose” vowel, not “goat.”
Odd they don’t provide a pronunciation.
This one
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/River_Frome,_Dorset
is another “Froom”, like the Gloucestershire one. Seems to be the pattern where the pronunciation is actually given.
This one
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/River_Frome,_Bristol
seems actually to have been written “Froom” previously.
So the curious user is just supposed to assume that if there’s no pronunciation give it’s said the way you’d expect from the spelling, even though there’s a famous unintuitive pronunciation? That’s not the approach taken with, e.g., the Thames River (/θeɪmz/ THAYMZ) in Connecticut.