QUIZ.

July 30, 2005 by 54 Comments

Name another city that falls into the same category as Carthage and Chiang Mai.

Comments

  1. Aidan Kehoe says
    July 30, 2005 at 6:06 pm

    Timbuktu? Never quite abandoned, but certainly a shadow of itself when it was the centre of a huge and powerful empire.

  2. mj says
    July 30, 2005 at 6:12 pm

    Constantinople–it begins with a “C” and it was a great city, a crossroads.

  3. Kattullus says
    July 30, 2005 at 6:31 pm

    Pachacamac maybe?
    I haven’t been there but I understand that there’s still a small village there.

  4. Dave Burkitt says
    July 30, 2005 at 6:53 pm

    Newton, MA. And many other Newtons.

  5. Tim May says
    July 30, 2005 at 7:01 pm

    Ha, yes, of course. I think Dave has it. So, Kota Bharu, Malaysia. According to Wikipedia, anyway.

  6. language hat says
    July 30, 2005 at 7:39 pm

    Yup, Dave has it. Those were the two least transparent ones I could come up with (more obvious ones being, eg, Novgorod or Naples), but Kota Bharu is excellent.

  7. pmdboi says
    July 30, 2005 at 7:43 pm

    Pondicherry, India; arguably Novosibirsk, Russia; and maybe even Neuchâtel, Switzerland?
    And, naturally, New City, New York, USA. Talk about your uncreative names.
    (This page was a lot of help.)

  8. Robert Staubs says
    July 30, 2005 at 8:05 pm

    There’re a fair number of Villeneuves in France and Switzerland. (In Brittany too, so a Kernevez as well.)

  9. Isabel says
    July 30, 2005 at 8:45 pm

    Villanova, Pennsylvania.

  10. Christopher Sundita says
    July 30, 2005 at 9:21 pm

    Bagumbayan in the province of Sultan Kudarat in the Philippines. There are also several Bagumbayans which are barangays (villages) within some municipalities throughout the country.
    –Chris

  11. John Emerson says
    July 30, 2005 at 9:30 pm

    There’s a French prose-poem about a very old Pont Neuf by Aloysius Bertrand, though I don’t have it here.

  12. J. Cassian says
    July 31, 2005 at 3:17 am

    Maybe this is what John is thinking of:
    ” N’importe ! dit-il un peu confus, Chateauneuf et
    Chateauvieux ne sont qu’un même château. Aussi bien il
    est temps de débaptiser le Pont-Neuf. ”

  13. language hat says
    July 31, 2005 at 8:20 am

    Waiter, a magnum of Châteauneuf du Pape for the table!

  14. Tim May says
    July 31, 2005 at 10:01 am

    After posting last night, I looked for more examples with Google (I was hoping to find one that began with C… no luck). Those not mentioned above include (allegedly):
    Geni Shehir (or Yenişehir -Turkish name for Larissa, Greece, and old name for Çankaya, a district of Ankara)
    Navekat (Sogdian city near Krasnaya Rechka, Kyrgyzstan)
    Nevsehir (Nevşehir, Turkey)
    Nowshera (Pakistan)
    Shahr-i-Naw (a district of Kabul, and in the 14th century a town near Pandua, West Bengal)

  15. Jim Parish says
    July 31, 2005 at 10:35 am

    Then, of course, there’s Cartagena, originally Carthago Nova – a nice torpenhowe.

  16. silmarillion says
    July 31, 2005 at 11:00 am

    Cartaghe is the roman name for Qart Hadast.
    There are plenty Villanueva and Vilanovas in spanish and portuguese toponymy.

  17. John Emerson says
    July 31, 2005 at 11:05 am

    Thans Cassian!

  18. Satyadasa says
    July 31, 2005 at 6:47 pm

    Jim just beat me on my attempted one up on Cartagena, but I’ll do it in triplicate with Nueva Cartagena FC. I suppose the “a” is all that is left from Punic and the “na” from Latin. Do you happen to know if Cartagena came to be Cartagena through an Arabic intermediary toponym – like Caesaraugusta > Saraqusta > Zaragoza?

  19. zyxt says
    July 31, 2005 at 9:18 pm

    In Dalmatia: Novigrad (not far away is Starigrad).
    In Hercegovina: Herceg Novi
    In Bosnia: Bosanski Novi.
    In Italy: Napoli
    In Sydney there has been a Newtown for years, so when they developed a new suburb recently they called it Newington.

  20. silmarillion says
    August 1, 2005 at 12:55 am

    Qart-Hadasch “new city”, Colonia Urbs Iulia Nova Carthago, Qartayannat al- Halfa, Qartayanna, Cartagena.

  21. bathrobe says
    August 1, 2005 at 1:45 am

    Newcastle? (No, too obvious).
    How about Novy Sad?

  22. mark says
    August 1, 2005 at 9:40 am

    Ujlengyel or Ujpuszta. Both small though.
    .

  23. mark says
    August 1, 2005 at 9:43 am

    Or Nieuwstad in Groningen. Is there a lower size limit?
    .

  24. John Emerson says
    August 1, 2005 at 1:39 pm

    New Munich, Minesota, pop. 213.
    Nova Scotia.

  25. bathrobe says
    August 1, 2005 at 8:43 pm

    Newmarket (UK, Canada, etc.)

  26. ill-advised says
    August 2, 2005 at 8:29 am

    There’s also a town called Novo mesto (“new town”) in Slovenia.

  27. [libcat] says
    August 3, 2005 at 12:17 pm

    how about (pardon my uneducated transcription) Nizhnij Novgorod? I once heard, I believe, that this means “New New City”, but they/I may have been mistaken. . . .

  28. language hat says
    August 3, 2005 at 12:34 pm

    No, I’m afraid it means ‘lower new city’; there is considerable controversy over what it’s lower than (perhaps the town of Gorodets), or whether it’s simply on the lower reaches of the river.

  29. bathrobe says
    August 4, 2005 at 8:40 am

    Newstead.

  30. Micah says
    August 9, 2005 at 10:44 am

    新竹市, in Taiwan.
    http://www.hccg.gov.tw/

  31. language hat says
    August 9, 2005 at 11:37 am

    Which is Hsinchu in the official transliteration (Wikipedia entry). But it means ‘new bamboo,’ and I was really looking for names that mean ‘new city’ or ‘new town.’ I suppose the Chinese would be Xincheng (Hsin-ch’eng); there are a few places of that name, but I don’t know if the last character is the one for ‘city.’

  32. juha says
    February 9, 2021 at 7:50 am

    Tanambao
    Tanambao (New Town) may be the most common name for a community in Madagascar. I lived several kilometres from a small, rural town called Tanambao and the map of Madagascar is riddled with other Tanambaos. In the port city of Toamasina (Saltiness) alone, there are several Tanambao neighborhoods which are differentiated with French numbers. At one point, these communities must have splintered off from larger, established towns. Perhaps the founders lacked originality. Maybe they felt some allegiance to their past community and its name. Either way the many New Towns of Madagascar were named with a pragmatism that doesn’t age very well.

    https://medium.com/@nicstev123/the-simple-beauty-of-malagasy-place-names-6dccae945465

  33. languagehat says
    February 9, 2021 at 8:22 am

    My Russian-Malagasy dictionary (of course I have a Russian-Malagasy dictionary) tells me that ‘city’ is tanana and ‘new’ is vao; I presume morphophonemics produces the -mb-. (It also tells me that “What’s new?” is “Inona no vaovao?”)

  34. juha says
    February 9, 2021 at 8:35 am

    From the same page:

    The first king of a united Madagascar was nicknamed Andrianampoinimerina which means “the Noble in the Heart of the Merina People.” This nickname stood in for his full title Andrianampoinimerinandriantsimitoviaminandriampanjaka.
    This morphological treasure would be the following sentence in English: The Noble in the Heart of the Merina People who is not the same as the Ruling Noble.

  35. juha says
    February 9, 2021 at 11:03 am

    I presume morphophonemics produces the -mb-

    Now,Malagasy has extensive sandhi rules—word and phrase incorporation, in which
    the final -a of a polysyllabic base is dropped, a pattern which suggests that these incorporation
    processes were in place historically before the -a was added. One way of viewing
    the synchronic result is that when a disyllabic base (with -a dropped) ends in a
    consonant and hosts incorporation, it must yield a form that satisfies the (C)V syllable
    template. For example, in mivarotra+hena ‘sells meat’ the -a drops, as does the voiceless
    postalveolar affricate tr (= /tr/), avoiding a prohibited consonant cluster, but its noncontinuant
    feature is inherited by the initial consonant of hena, yielding mivaro-kena.
    Similarly, mangataka+fary ‘steals sugarcane’ becomes mangata-pary, and manana+
    vola ‘has money’ becomes manam-bola. In all cases the initial consonant of the incorporee
    inherits the feature noncontinuant from its host. This is a nice case where the historical
    perspective of AL gives insight into complicated synchronic morphophonology.

    https://www.linguisticsociety.org/sites/default/files/09_93.1Keenan.pdf

  36. languagehat says
    February 9, 2021 at 11:25 am

    Wow, now I wish I’d studied Malagasy! What wonderful contraptions languages are.

  37. David Marjanović says
    February 9, 2021 at 1:16 pm

    (of course I have a Russian-Malagasy dictionary)

    This wouldn’t be half as funny as it is after you just wrote “(of course I have a Russian-Hausa dictionary)” the other day.

  38. languagehat says
    February 9, 2021 at 1:22 pm

    I was hoping for a cumulative effect.

  39. David Marjanović says
    February 9, 2021 at 4:11 pm

    Now that I’ve read the OP, I can offer Wiener Neustadt and Wiener Neudorf.

  40. Hans says
    February 10, 2021 at 5:45 am

    Besides that, there’s a lot of Neustadts in the German speaking countries.

  41. David Eddyshaw says
    February 10, 2021 at 6:10 am

    The name of the village Tempane (Tɛmpaan in Kusaal) near Bawku (probably) means “New Villages.”

  42. Y says
    February 10, 2021 at 6:17 am

    Carthage.

  43. SFReader says
    February 10, 2021 at 6:24 am

    Pochinok or Pochinki is a name of many small villages in Russia.

    Means “new settlement” (literally “new start”).

  44. PlasticPaddy says
    February 10, 2021 at 6:24 am

    @hans
    I believe all these Neustadt were part of an Illuminati plot to turn Germans into Neapolitans. Fortunately (or unfortunately?) for the world, this plot did not succeed, apart from promoting the un-German foods of pizza and ice-cream, which even the most staunch German traditionalists have not succeeded in eliminating.

  45. David Eddyshaw says
    February 10, 2021 at 6:37 am

    this plot did not succeed

    Fortunately, for sure: a German ‘Ndrangheta would probably have conquered the world of crime by now. Less efficient criminal organisations would have no chance.That terrifying Protestant work ethic …

  46. David Eddyshaw says
    February 10, 2021 at 7:07 am

    Camorra, rather (great name for a VW car!): though ‘Ndrangheta is an interesting name anyway:

    https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%27ndrangheta#Italian

  47. Hans says
    February 10, 2021 at 7:11 am

    a German ‘Ndrangheta would probably have conquered the world of crime by now
    Thanks for your confidence in our abilities, but Germans trying to conquer the world has always ended in catastrophic failure. We may be (or may have been) efficient, but we never knew when to stop (except for Bismarck).

  48. David Eddyshaw says
    February 10, 2021 at 7:19 am

    Never get involved in a land war in Asia …

    (Which, in this context, goes rather happily with the further advice “Never go in against a Sicilian when death is on the line.”)

  49. John Emerson says
    February 10, 2021 at 9:14 am

    If Karl XII had known when to stop we’d all be eating pickled herring for breakfast, and that would be a good thing.

  50. languagehat says
    February 10, 2021 at 9:45 am

    Carthage.

    You didn’t actually read the post, did you? Go ahead, it’s only one sentence.

    ‘Ndrangheta is an interesting name anyway

    Indeed. For what it’s worth, Nick Nicholas agrees with the andragathia etymology.

  51. juha says
    February 10, 2021 at 10:18 am

    Somehow, Nystad/Uusikaupunki (both mean ‘new’ and ‘town’) has been left out.

    The Treaty of Nystad (Russian: Ништадтский мир; Finnish: Uudenkaupungin rauha; Swedish: Freden i Nystad; Estonian: Uusikaupunki rahu) was the last peace treaty of the Great Northern War of 1700–1721. It was concluded between the Tsardom of Russia and the Swedish Empire on 10 September [O.S. 30 August] 1721 in the then Swedish town of Nystad (Finnish: Uusikaupunki, in the south-west of present-day Finland).

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_of_Nystad

  52. Y says
    February 10, 2021 at 11:12 am

    Hat: I might have, in 2005…

  53. Y says
    February 10, 2021 at 11:20 am

    Yancuitlan.

  54. languagehat says
    February 10, 2021 at 11:28 am

    Nice one!

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