Vindo not Celtic not meaning "white"?

[MOESAN]

interesting but somewhat hazardous

Vindo- in Early Place Names

Anthony Durham



2021, Academia Letters

[MOESAN]

...
My analyses of hundreds of names must often be oversimplied or too general. The in-evitablemistakeswillpleasepartisansforthetradition alCeltic‘white, pure’model, whichhasbeen endorsed by just about every distinguished academic linguist with experience in Celticlanguages. These scholars have paid too much attention to linguistic theory and not enoughto map reading.Howfarcanthislogicbetaken? Whataboutpersonalanddivinenames? Asearchthroughthe Clauss-Slaby epigraphic database produces nearly a thousand mentions of VIND, or simi-lar, which need to be painstakingly examined and whittled down. Several hundred can rapidlybe thrown out as linguistic coincidences (based on
quindecim
‘fteen’,
vindemia
‘grape har-vest’,
vindictus
‘freed slave’, etc) and post-Roman special cases (
Reccesvindus
etc).The overwhelming majority of VIND epigraphs are very Roman, not Celtic. Particularlyprominent is one of the earliest attested Latin words,
vindex
‘defender, claimant, champion’,from which hundreds of Roman soldiers and their families drew names
Vindex
or its deriva-tives
Vindicius
,
Vindicianus
, etc. Romans seem to have rung the changes around that core(in spelling, grammar, and creativity) in much the same way as there are now hundreds of variations on John Smith.Great swathes of Latin (for example in the retirement diplomas of soldiers who were
PiisVindicibus
‘loyal and erce’) soon show that personal names based on VIND often derivedfrom a place name. The champion leavers of epigraphs were
Vindelici
soldiers recruited fromthe oodplain of the river Lech around modern Augst in Bavaria. In fact, the overwhelmingmajority of VIND names came from regions that entered history speaking a Germanic lan-guage. Maybe regions such as Austria or the Rhineland had a particularly noteworthy contrastbetween hills and valley bottoms.A good place to seek low-status British personal names is curse tablets, but they must betreated with caution, because curses often used formulaic, hocus-pocus language, with Latin
vindico
‘to claim’ prominent. Also VIND-, not necessarily a fuller VINDIC-, may mark former slaves.In the end, it becomes necessary to examine in forensic detail just a few names mostcommonly cited as strong evidence for old thinking. For example,
Apollo Vindonno
on votivestatue inscriptions may have been a local protective god of an
onno
‘spring’, a holy well atthe head of a valley. And
Alcovindos
makes sense starting like Latin
alces
‘elk’, because deerthrive in wet, wooded valleys.The personal name
Cunovendus
, clearly linked to Britain and attested repeatedly, has rstelement
Cuno
, of debatable meaning (possibly like ‘hound’, ‘kin’, ‘head’, or ‘chine’). Was
Cunovendus
blonde or an ex-slave? Did he keep hounds, or live at the head of a valley? Aswith many compound names, reversing its order of elements yields another name, the place
Academia Letters, November 2021
Corresponding Author:
Anthony Durham, [email protected]
Citation:
Durham, A. (2021). Vindo- in Early Place Names.
Academia Letters
, Article 4033.
https://doi.org/10.20935/AL4033
.
3
©2021 by the author — Open Access — Distributed under CC BY 4.0

[MOESAN]

Durham:
Vindo- in ancient names Evidence to back up a short article in Academia Letters
Hundreds of proper names (of places, rivers, people, gods, etc) contain an element of form W-vowel-(N)-(D), where that letter W could also appear as V, U, UU, F, B, or OU; the vowel could be E, I, or A; the D could be T, Ð, or absent altogether; and sometimes the N could disappear. What did that element mean?


As will become clear, the common geographical feature associated with Vindo- and Venta in many
ancient place names is some relatively flat land liable to seasonal flooding, typically produced by a
meandering river. All rivers tend, in their lower regions, to wind around and erode a sinuous course
into soft ground, but every so often they overflow badly and jump to new courses. The end result is
a floodplain or, on a long enough timescale, a set of river terraces. The resulting landform, whether
one calls it a floodplain, meander belt, water meadows, valley floor (German Talebene), or river
terrace, was a biologically productive environment, in which people could grow crops, raise animals,
or develop an entire civilization.

The earliest clear explanation of this idea that I know is by Blanca Prosper (1998), who looked at
Vindupalis, a Ligurian (non-Celtic) name for a river in the upper Polcevera valley above Genoa,
mentioned in a legal decision from 117 BC. She concluded that “European river names from *wid-
ub/p-, *wind-ub/p- roughly meant curved river, crooked watercourse”.


A key insight came from Reiner Lipp (2020), who explained, together with Luke Gorton (2017), that
words for wine, with all their diverse spellings across European languages, descend from a word for
‘twiner, creeping plant, tendril, grapevine’ from PIE *wei- ‘to turn, twist around’. Evidently that ancient
root could also apply to winding rivers...]

this *wei- has been fertile in I-E languages; I think in the Breton gwe- verbal root which means to twist, gwi : weaving, gwial : flexible small branch -
this root seems having given birth (+suffix) to *wel- 4 to roll, to turn and to *wer- to turn, to twist,
all these meanigns close to to swing ... no obstacle concerning wind in Germanic languages; so no objection until now and here.

[torzio]

Durham:
Vindo- in ancient names Evidence to back up a short article in Academia Letters
Hundreds of proper names (of places, rivers, people, gods, etc) contain an element of form W-vowel-(N)-(D), where that letter W could also appear as V, U, UU, F, B, or OU; the vowel could be E, I, or A; the D could be T, Ð, or absent altogether; and sometimes the N could disappear. What did that element mean?


As will become clear, the common geographical feature associated with Vindo- and Venta in many
ancient place names is some relatively flat land liable to seasonal flooding, typically produced by a
meandering river. All rivers tend, in their lower regions, to wind around and erode a sinuous course
into soft ground, but every so often they overflow badly and jump to new courses. The end result is
a floodplain or, on a long enough timescale, a set of river terraces. The resulting landform, whether
one calls it a floodplain, meander belt, water meadows, valley floor (German Talebene), or river
terrace, was a biologically productive environment, in which people could grow crops, raise animals,
or develop an entire civilization.

The earliest clear explanation of this idea that I know is by Blanca Prosper (1998), who looked at
Vindupalis, a Ligurian (non-Celtic) name for a river in the upper Polcevera valley above Genoa,
mentioned in a legal decision from 117 BC. She concluded that “European river names from *wid-
ub/p-, *wind-ub/p- roughly meant curved river, crooked watercourse”.


A key insight came from Reiner Lipp (2020), who explained, together with Luke Gorton (2017), that
words for wine, with all their diverse spellings across European languages, descend from a word for
‘twiner, creeping plant, tendril, grapevine’ from PIE *wei- ‘to turn, twist around’. Evidently that ancient
root could also apply to winding rivers...]

this *wei- has been fertile in I-E languages; I think in the Breton gwe- verbal root which means to twist, gwi : weaving, gwial : flexible small branch -
this root seems having given birth (+suffix) to *wel- 4 to roll, to turn and to *wer- to turn, to twist,
all these meanigns close to to swing ... no obstacle concerning wind in Germanic languages; so no objection until now and here.

you also have the latin word Venetus ( as Romans created venetic from )

venetus (feminine veneta, neuter venetum); first/second-declension adjective

- of or pertaining to the Veneti; Venetian
- blue, blue-green, sea-blue


or the celtic, venetic, illyrian Vend from here
https://www.academia.edu/37361146/Th...f_Roman_Siscia

[MOESAN]

Durham:
[...
In Roman Britain
Here are 8 reasonably certain examples with vowel I, where hyperlinks lead to discussions of their
locations and possible meanings of their other name element.
Roman name Location Other element
Vindocladia Poole ditch
Ουινδογαρα Troon gore
Vindolanda Chesterholm land
Vindomora Ebchester marsh
Vindomi Neatham spring
Vindovala Rudchester wall
Vinovia Binchester banks
Magiovinium Fenny Stratford platter

And with vowel E:
Bannavem Taburniae Fintry bann
Bannaventa nr Daventy bann
Derbentione Derby deer
Derventione Stamford Bridge deer
Derventione Papcastle deer
Glanoventa Ambleside bank
Venta Belgarum Twyford –
Venta Icenorum Caistor St Edmund –
Venta Silurum Caerwent –

Less certain:-
Αβραουαννου nr Luce ?αβρος
Ουεδρα Wear mouth ?-ary
Venedotia Gwynedd –
Venutio nr Peebles suffix
Vinion island off Troon –
...]

Me: I think the forms withtout final stop or with -t stop have to be dropped off; IMO, the wind- (vindo-) element seems specifically Germanic with this meaning of twisting, turn, wing and so on. In Celtic, this last form seems limited to the white or pure > blessed meaning; ATW the "white" thing can be linked to places under snow, sometimes at least? the *wei- derived forms with the twist/turn meanings in European I-E languages seem rather found under *wer-/*wel- derived words...

[MOESAN]

the meanings linked to 'water' or 'wave' are based on an I-E *u(n)d root (> English 'water', 'wet', Slavic 'voda', Latin 'unda' French 'onde' and their forms seem far enough to the precise 'wind-' of Germanic or old 'vindo-' of placenames. And the "wave" aspect is far from the meaning of "winding river in a flat place", spite we have to be cautious about evolution of significations in languages, which can go very far if not too quickly. Before to go faurther I agree this approach by Durham, linking toponymy to topography, is an unavoidable pace to do, not always done by some old scholars, by instance in France toponymy where someones searched the most of the time explications through personal names of supposed proprietors.