Sokoto.

Comments

1. David Eddyshaw says

   June 5, 2026 at 6:21 pm

   Looks quite impossible to me. (Sakkwato is correct for the Hausa name, though.)

   But then, kasuwa “market” really is derived from Arabic su:q (via Kanuri), so who knows?

   Folk etymology isn’t much of a thing with toponyms in Western-Oti-Volta-speaking country*, as most toponyms are actually fairly transparent. (Ethnonyms are another matter, doubtless because hardly any of those are transparent. I have been confidently informed that “Kusaasi” comes from the Hausa kusa “near”, for example; which probably seems less far-fetched if you’re close to some Kusaasi people at the time …)

   But I think the names of the various Hausa states are another matter. None of them seem to mean anything other than themselves.

   * Having said that, “Ouagadougou” gets some spectacular ones sometimes. I like the current WP suggestion that it may be from Soninke: it doesn’t seem analysable in Mooré, anyhow.
2. languagehat says

   June 5, 2026 at 6:24 pm

   Looks quite impossible to me.

   I’m glad I’m not the only one.
3. David Eddyshaw says

   June 5, 2026 at 6:48 pm

   “Market” tout court actually doesn’t strike me as all that likely as a place name. “New Market”, sure, (like the famous Sanjak), “So-and-so’s Market”, or whatever, but not just “Market.”

   Ouagoudougou doesn’t seem to have an Agolle Kusaal name (hardly anywhere outside Kusaasiland does), but Niggli’s Toende Kusaal dictionary gives Wa’arʋk, which appeals to my sense of linguistic propriety as being more or less what the Toende equivalent of Mooré Waogdgo really ought to be if it was actually a cognate. (Sadly, it doesn’t seem to mean anything in Kusaal either.)
4. David Eddyshaw says

   June 5, 2026 at 8:44 pm

   Sokoto was apparently a no-account place before Muhammadu Bello pretty much founded it. I wonder if the locals (presumably responsible for the name of the place) actually spoke Hausa at the beginning of the nineteenth century? Sokoto is fairly peripheral within Hausaland, even after the past couple of centuries of vigorous expansion.
5. Xerîb says

   June 5, 2026 at 9:16 pm

   There is something of interest here, on page 227, especially footnote 1. For more on this Sokotoma, apparently with a Kanuri suffix -mà denoting ownership or overlordship, see here p. 555 (translation) and here p. 559 (brief commentary). Short comment because I have to go to sleep now.
6. languagehat says

   June 5, 2026 at 10:37 pm

   Thanks, I figured you’d have some applicable sources!
7. David Eddyshaw says

   June 5, 2026 at 11:11 pm

   Sounds like the name is substantially older than the Caliphate. Fulfulde* may well be a better bet for its origin than Hausa. It’s a long way from Kanuri country, despite this -ma. And there may well have been other languages around those parts two-hundred-odd years ago.

   Interesting that these sources have “Sokoto”; Hausa “o” is always a long vowel, so “Sakkwatō” could be a Hausaficated form of an original “Sŏkŏtō” rather than “Sokoto” being a European mangling of Hausa “Sakkwato” (as Bargery has it.) Of course, both may be true …

   * Or Tuareg? It doesn’t look particularly Tuareg to me, but my knowledge of Tamasheq is only marginally greater than my knowledge of Albanian. But there are those amongst us who Actually Know.
8. AntC says

   June 5, 2026 at 11:44 pm

   “Market” tout court actually doesn’t strike me as all that likely as a place name.

   There’s a few towns in Blighty named “Market xxx”: Market Harborough, Market Weighton off the top of my head.

   Their naming history seems to be to disambiguate several settlements in the same locale: in the Manor of Wicstun, the one where the market’s held.
9. languagehat says

   June 6, 2026 at 7:18 am

   There’s a few towns in Blighty named “Market xxx”: Market Harborough, Market Weighton off the top of my head.

   So they’re not “Market” tout court.
10. David Eddyshaw says

    June 6, 2026 at 8:06 am

    I see that there is a Fulfulde word sokottu “defect, fault”, but that doesn’t strike me as the sort of name even the most dour of inhabitants would be likely to give to their own village. Even if there is a Nabdema village called “reheated leftovers.” (“Sakote”, as it happens …)

    On the other hand, “Bawku” means “hole in the ground, pit.” I suppose not everyone is a fan of town life.
11. Seong of Baekje says

    June 6, 2026 at 9:06 am

    “Market” tout court actually doesn’t strike me as all that likely as a place name. “New Market”, sure, (like the famous Sanjak), “So-and-so’s Market”, or whatever, but not just “Market.”

    The closest I can think of is Köping in Sweden.
12. Jen in Edinburgh says

    June 6, 2026 at 9:14 am

    There are few places called ‘X na feille’ in the Highlands – hill/site/whatever of the market – which is probably about as close as you’d get to just being called ‘market’ under Gaelic naming habits, but they’re not generally villages, just the spaces where people came together.

    Drochaid an Aonachan/Spean Bridge (‘Bridge of the fair/gathering’) is the exception that comes to mind, although the modern village isn’t in quite the same place as the original bridge.
13. David Eddyshaw says

    June 6, 2026 at 9:26 am

    “Chepstow” is etymologically “marketplace”, come to think of it.

    “Dapaong” in Togo (a town I once knew well) could be “New Market”, but I don’t know its tones in Moba.
14. Jerry Friedman says

    June 6, 2026 at 10:20 am

    Mart, Texas, was “was probably named by Hiram Breland or his son, Albert, generally regarded as the first settlers, who expected the town to become a marketing and trading center.”

    Edward and Jean Callary, Texas Place Names (2020)
15. David Marjanović says

    June 6, 2026 at 10:23 am

    The most likely origin is the word, [sic] Tergeste – with the -est- suffix typical of Venetic – and derived from the hypothetical Illyrian word *terg- “market” (etymologically cognate to the Albanian term treg ‘market, marketplace'[6] and reconstructed Proto-Slavic “*tъrgъ“).[6][7][8] Roman authors also transliterated the name as Tergestum (according to Strabo, the name of the oppidum Tergestum originated from the three battles the Roman Army had to engage in with local tribes, “TER GESTUM [BELLUM]”).

    Wikipedia on Trieste. Of course the “thrice waged war” is a just-so story.
16. PlasticPaddy says

    June 6, 2026 at 10:23 am

    Nenagh = Aonach Urmhumhan
    I was unaware of the longer form; an tAonach (the fair) is an alternative and more used in signage, etc.
17. David Eddyshaw says

    June 6, 2026 at 4:16 pm

    I see that August Klingenheben’s Die Sprache der Ful gives Sokkoto for the place name in Fulfulde; the kk (to say nothing of the vowels) suggests that this can’t be borrowed from English. I think Hausa Sakkwato must indeed be an adaptation to Hausa phonotactics of an original non-Hausa name “Sŏkkŏto.”

    Unfortunately Klingenheben’s work doesn’t shed any further light on the etymology.

    The references in Xerîb’s links to a tamarind tree made me wonder if it might mean that, but apparently not, at least not in Fulfulde (where that seems to be jammere.)

    The original capital of what would eventually become the Mossi-Dagomba states is at Pusiga in Kusaasiland (pusig “tamarind tree.”) The Founder is supposed to have been swallowed by the earth there. It made me wonder if the tree might have some royal significance, but it looks like that was just a red herring.
18. Nachasz says

    June 6, 2026 at 4:56 pm

    @David Eddyshaw

    “Market” tout court actually doesn’t strike me as all that likely as a place name. “New Market”, sure, (like the famous Sanjak), “So-and-so’s Market”, or whatever, but not just “Market.”

    Apparently there are some Trgovištes without any adjective. As well as Trhovište in Slovakia, Tǎrgovište in Bulgaria, Târgoviște in Romania, then one Targowica in Poland and five in Ukraine
19. David Eddyshaw says

    June 6, 2026 at 5:01 pm

    It’s actually a bit surprising that there seem to be no villages or towns just called “Market” in the Oti-Volta area, given that that’s how most of them actually seem to have started. I suppose it just wasn’t sufficiently distinctive.

    But then, e.g. “Rock” (Kugri) or “Tree Stump” (Tilli) are not tremendously distinctive either.
20. Cuconnacht says

    June 6, 2026 at 5:45 pm

    Turku in Finland comes from the same root as Nachasz’s examples, as does Trieste, with the same “place” suffix that they have.
21. PlasticPaddy says

    June 6, 2026 at 7:33 pm

    @de
    I think you may have given up too easily on Fulfulde after finding the “fault” word. There is also
    —
    cokke-dawaaɗi ᠪᠫᠬᠭᠮ n 1) Frn espèce de plante Eng The Nigerian Squill nom scientific:
    Albuca nigritana
    —
    (a) this is a plant name
    (b) you get the wa syllable without having to explain it by “adaptation to Hausa phonetics” (of course you have to explain other adaptations, but not c->s, Fulfulde does this itself sometimes)
22. Xerîb says

    June 6, 2026 at 8:01 pm

    And there may well have been other languages around those parts two-hundred-odd years ago.

    but not c->s, Fulfulde does this itself sometimes

    I just looked at Palmer’s facsimile to see exactly what the spelling of the title that he interpreted as Sokotoma was in the document of 1694 from the Bornu Empire.

    The document affirms the exemptions from taxes and other obligations of a certain Gabidama, overlord of certain Fellata (here, simply ‘Fulani’, ‘Fufulde’? Kanuri fəlatá ‘Fulani’) of Gabi, which Palmer equates with modern Kebbi. A client state of the Bornu Empire at the time? The title Gabidama would seem to contain -mà, too. The document mentions Sokotoma Ayesha, daughter of Ali III Walamma, at the very end, as a person of standing in this affirmation, and Palmer describes her as the ‘patroness’ of these Fellata.

    The title Sokotoma is found on page 551, in the right hand column, in the middle of 2nd line from the top of the page here. It would seems to read as follows (unfortunately, our word must be extricated from a bit of a calligraphic crash site to be read):

    ثُڪُوتُمَهْ

    This appears to have /s/ (or what had come to be /s/ in the name by the beginning of the 19th century) written with the letter ث (Classical Arabic /θ/)—which seemed a bit odd to me. But /s/ is a possible treatment of original Arabic /θ/ in both Hausa and Kanuri. Also, the name now pronounced Usman in the region, عثمان, occurs frequently in the document, spelled with ث of course. (There is also a ceremonial or legal phrase in an unknown(?) language elsewhere in the document—or at least, the phrase is unknown and unintelligible to modern Kanuri according to Palmer. In the phrase, simply س, CA /s/, is used for what is presumably /s/. Palmer has an attempt at interpretation of the phrase.) I am very far from having the expertise necessary to evaluate any of Palmer’s proposals relating to this document. I am just summarizing them for the LH reader insofar as they relate to the title Sokotoma.

    Bondarev, ‘Old Kanembu and Kanuri in Arabic Script: Phonology through the Graphic System’, has some discussion of the historical use of ث in Old Kanembu and Kanuri beginning on page 119 here (see especially page 121). Originally ث was used to represent an affricate (or affricates) in Old Kanembu. Perhaps that would account for the use of ث in Sokotoma in the document, if it reflects the traditional spelling of an old local name as used in the circles of Bornu?
23. David Eddyshaw says

    June 6, 2026 at 8:09 pm

    I think you may have given up too easily on Fulfulde after finding the “fault” word

    I don’t think there is any realistic way to get Hausa Sakkwato from cokke-dawaaɗi.

    The wa-for-ŏ thing after a velar is actually pretty standard in Hausa – it’s not any kind of stretch. It happens language-internally when Hausa o (which is always long) gets stranded in a closed syllable, because Hausa does not permit long vowels in closed syllables.

    It would be nice to find a plausible plant name to identify as the origin, though. Kusaasi toponyms are very often tree or plant names, which is why I had transient hopes of “tamarind.” I don’t know how far this characterises the wider region, though. It’s probably got a lot to do with the fact that the Kusaasi are predominantly rural farmers who live scattered in their own compounds, and villages are a comparatively recent phenomenon, often mainly inhabited by non-Kusaasi. But the Hausa have had towns since forever.

    @Xerîb:

    Interesting stuff!

    Kebbi is the right area, at least. If the identification with Sokoto is correct, it’s interesting that a hundred years before Usman ɗan Fodiyo’s Jihad, the Bornu authorities already seem to be describing the place as Fulɓe territory, not Hausa.
24. David Eddyshaw says

    June 6, 2026 at 9:05 pm

    To be particularly pedantic (THIS IS LANGUAGEHAT!!!!), there is actually no /w/ in Hausa Sakkwato: the written kkw stands for a geminate labialised velar. Sequences of three consonants are not possible in Hausa.

    The labialisation of the /k/ before a rounded vowel is automatic, and it remains when a following short(ened) /o/ is forcibly turned into /a/ by the exigencies of Hausa phonotactics.

    Oti-Volta does this too, though with actual labial-velar stops rather than mere labialised velars; so you get e.g. Mooré kṍbre “bone”, but Gulimancema kpábílī. (Cognate with Swahili mfupa “bone”, but that is so obvious that it hardly needs pointing out.)
25. David Eddyshaw says

    June 6, 2026 at 10:24 pm

    Distressingly, not one of my Oti-Volta dictionaries has a word for Albuca nigritana, though the Kew Gardens map shows that it’s found all over West Africa.

    I did find the rather poetic Mooré name tãoos-naab ko-yũudu “chief hunter’s thirst” for Urginea glaucescens.

    Not as good qua poetry as the Kusaal na’apu’a-kʋ-si’is-ku’om “princess-won’t-touch-water”, though. The dictionary says this is Amaryllis belladonna, but I suspect it’s actually some kind of water lily, and the “amaryllis” gloss in Naden’s dictionary is just because it’s used to render “lily” in the Bible. As far as I can make out, Amaryllis belladonna is not native to West Africa. Lexicographers tend not to be any better at botany than I am.

    https://powo.science.kew.org/taxon/urn:lsid:ipni.org:names:62705-1
26. David Eddyshaw says

    June 7, 2026 at 9:41 am

    @PP:

    How are you getting your Fulfulde data? The script is presumably supposed to come out as Adlam, which (to my surprise) is actually present on my (Android) phone:

    𞤀𞤤𞤳𞤵𞤤𞤫 𞤁𞤢𞤲𞤣𞤢𞤴𞤯𞤫 𞤂𞤫𞤻𞤮𞤤 𞤃𞤵𞤤𞤵𞤺𞤮𞤤

    It’s otherwise the same text as in the SIL dictionary app, but mine doesn’t give Adlam transcriptions (more’s the pity.)

    Visible unscrambled on my laptop too (running Ubuntu.)
27. languagehat says

    June 7, 2026 at 9:57 am

    When I put that string into GT’s “fulani to english” search box, I get:

    𞤀𞤳𞤵𞤤𞤫 𞤁𞤢𞤲𞤣𞤢𞤴 🤂𞤫𞤻𞤮🤤 𞤃𞤵🤵
28. David Eddyshaw says

    June 7, 2026 at 10:09 am

    GT Fulani-to-Welsh informs me that it means

    🤀🞤�🞤�🞤🞤🞫 🤁🞤�🞤�🞤�🞤�🞤� 🤂🞤�🞤�🤮🤤 🞤�🞤�🤵

    Obviously, this reflects the VSO constituent order of Welsh.

    GT is crap at all African languages (even when it can cope with the script) wherever I’m in a position to tell. I think those options are there purely for window-dressing; though, to be fair, in the current US climate, it’s nice that they feel that such window-dressing is actually a good thing.

    It’s from here, in fact:

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

    and apparently means “the alphabet that protects the peoples from vanishing”, which is a nice, if somewhat naive, idea. (Well, the creators were teenagers at the time. If you can’t be naively hopeful as a teenager, when can you?)

    [Given the Latin script version, GT renders it “The Alphabet of the Mulugol People”, so it does at least recognise two of the lexemes.]
29. PlasticPaddy says

    June 7, 2026 at 10:47 am

    @de
    Data from p.52 of this dictionary:
    https://www.webonary.org/fulfuldeburkina/files/Dictionnaire-Fulfulde-fran%C3%A7ais-english-et-images.pdf
    I use copy and paste from the dictionary entry
30. David Eddyshaw says

    June 7, 2026 at 11:12 am

    Ah. Only Latin script there. Must be a weird copy-and-paste thing.

    In a spirit of enquiry, I tried copying-and-pasting the “Nigerian Squill” entry on my phone and got

    cokkecokkecokkecokke- – -dawaadawaadawaadawaaɗ ɗ ɗi i i Noun Class Markers: plur: ɗe.
    Sorting Designation: 5, pl. Nom. 1 • espèce de plante; The Nigerian Squill. Catégorie : Herbes, plantes grimpantes. Albuca nigritana.

    with two pdf-viewing apps, but the perfectly sane

    cokke-dawaaɗi Noun Class Markers: plur: ɗe.
    Sorting Designation: 5, pl. Nom. 1 • espèce de
    plante; The Nigerian Squill. Catégorie
    : Herbes, plantes grimpantes. Albuca
    nigritana

    with the Google Drive viewer.

    None of them actually copies pdfs I created myself properly, or indeed other pdfs.

    Now I want a Fulfulde dictionary with Adlam script.

    I see that Richard Smith (who edited the dictionary) has also written a grammar of Burkina Faso Fulfulde:

    https://mooreburkina.com/sites/www.mooreburkina.com/files/Fulfulde%20grammar%20236%20pages.pdf

    Looks quite good.

    I was puzzled by his ascription to SIM rather than SIL, but it’s actually

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SIM_(Christian_organization)

    which was the Sudan Interior Mission in the Good Old Days.
31. ktschwarz says

    June 7, 2026 at 11:29 am

    ᠪᠫᠬᠭᠮ is Mongolian (this came up here before with PlasticPaddy’s copy-pastes from that dictionary). And it’s the same for every entry and corresponds to what looks like an audio icon in the pdf; maybe there were audio clips on some other platform, but all that’s left now is an OCR error.
32. ktschwarz says

    June 7, 2026 at 11:59 am

    Analyse string is how you answer the question “What script is that?”
33. Jerry Friedman says

    June 7, 2026 at 12:12 pm

    @DE: the perfectly sane […] The Nigerian Squill. Catégorie: Herbes, plantes grimpantes.

    Perfectly sane (strangely so, in that it’s found in Nigeria and is in the squill subfamily) except that I’ll be surprised if this bulbous squill-like plant is really a plante grimpante (vine).

    Wikipedia says plants of this genus are also poetically called “slime lilies” because of their mucilaginous juice.
34. David Eddyshaw says

    June 7, 2026 at 2:08 pm

    Apropos of not a lot, my eye was caught in this Fulfulde dictionary by jammbu “deceit, cheating, fraud”, which is obviously the same word as Kusaal zam “cheat” (verb), Mooré zã̀mbe “cheat” (verb again), Hausa zàmbá “deception”, Tondi Songway Kiini zàmbá; I recall Lameen suggesting that Songhay was the ultimate source of this disreputable Wanderwort, but it seems to be remarkably popular over a wide area.

    Fulfulde has no /z/, and substitutes its j in loans, whereas Hausa and Songhay have both, so Fulfulde isn’t likely to be the origin. I wonder if the word turns up in the more westerly dialects of Fulfulde, or only in those in contact with Songhay or Hausa?
35. Xerîb says

    June 7, 2026 at 2:29 pm

    It’s not Arabic ذنب ḏanb ‘sin, crime, fault, misdeed, transgression’ ?

    I am on the road and can’t look into the question at the moment.
36. David Eddyshaw says

    June 7, 2026 at 2:50 pm

    That’s a thought. I think it probably works phonologically.

    The sense of these West African words seems to be consistently “cheating, deception”, which is not quite “crime, transgression”, but one could imagine such a semantic shift happening.
37. David Marjanović says

    June 7, 2026 at 3:10 pm

    I use copy and paste from the dictionary entry

    Many PDFs have encoding quirks (for typographic niceties as well as special characters) that are incompatible with Unicode.

    And academia.edu turns some of them up to 11. Only some, though.

    ḏanb

    It just occurred to me to wonder if trick, widespread across Europe in recent decades, is from a Norman version of triche…
38. David Eddyshaw says

    June 7, 2026 at 3:36 pm

    Talking of mysterious loans, I’ve long wondered about Kusaal dàŋkɔ̀ŋ “measles”, which seems to have neither cognates nor any obvious loan source.

    I just discovered that Ernst Haaf, in his highly impressive monograph Die Kusase, says of measles

    Bei den Kusase ist die Krankheit wegen der hohen Sterblichkeit und wegen der Gefahr der Erblindung so gefürchtet, dass man es nicht wagt, der Krankheit einen besonderen Namen zu geben, da man glaubt, beim Aussprechen des Namens die Erkrankung herbeizurufen. So nennt man die Masern mit dem Mamprusi-Wort BONZE, “Etwas”, oder DANKONG, was so viel wie “belästigt kleine Kinder” bedeudet. Das Wort soll der Mosisprache entnommen sein.

    (I can vouch for the high mortality and the blinding.)
    I don’t think Haaf actually spoke Kusaal, but he was an extraordinarily accurate recorder of what he heard, and I’m sure this reflects what he was told by actual speakers.

    BONZE is probably Mampruli bun-seaa “some thing.” I don’t think the attribution of DANKONG to Mooré can be right (I long ago noticed that Mooré is the Kusaasi’s default language to ascribe supposed foreign influences to), but the gloss does actually make sense as a cognate of Kusaal dàam “trouble, disturb” and a cognate of Mooré kàmbá “children.” Mooré doesn’t have the “disturb” verb, but Farefare has cognates of both: dãan, kɔma.

    So I’ve no doubt that Haaf’s informant gave this explanation in good faith, but I have to say it looks uncomfortably like a folk etymology to me. Taboo avoidance does look like a possible origin though.
39. mollymooly says

    June 7, 2026 at 5:19 pm

    “Market” tout court actually doesn’t strike me as all that likely as a place name.
    trawling wikipedia disambiguation pages and excluding city neighbourhoods

    de
    Markt (Biberbach), Ortsteil von Biberbach, Landkreis Augsburg, Bayern, mit Burg Markt
    Markt (Dornbirn), Bezirk von Dornbirn, Vorarlberg
    Markt (Gemeinde Schwarzau), Hauptort und Ortschaft Schwarzau im Gebirge von Schwarzau, Bezirk Neunkirchen, Niederösterreich

    fr
    Marché (Theux), hameau de la commune belge de Theux en Région wallonne.

    tr—some are these are apparently homonyms
    Pazar, Rize, Rize ili bir ilçesi
    Pazar, Tokat, Tokat ili bir ilçesi
    Pazar, Kızılcahamam, Ankara ili Kızılcahamam ilçesine bağlı mahalle
    Pazar, Nusaybin, Mardin ili Nusaybin ilçesine bağlı mahalle
40. mollymooly says

    June 7, 2026 at 5:31 pm

    Nenagh = Aonach Urmhumhan
    I was unaware of the longer form; an tAonach (the fair) is an alternative and more used in signage, etc.

    The Placenames Database of Ireland has an unusually long comment tl;dr short form attested 1220 to 1794, long form 1596 to 1840. The short form is now the official one. The current usual policy in assigning official Irish names to places outside the Gaeltacht is to try to find the usual name by the last generation of local Irish speakers. (Often this was recorded by John O’Donovan.) Nenagh/Aonach seems to be a slight exception.
41. Jerry Friedman says

    June 7, 2026 at 9:43 pm

    I’ll be surprised if this bulbous squill-like plant is really a plante grimpante (vine).

    To remove all of you from the tenterhooks, I’m not surprised.

    https://www.inaturalist.org/observations?taxon_id=506688

    The best pictures are in the third observation, but you have to click on the pinkynails below the thumbnail.
42. David Eddyshaw says

    June 7, 2026 at 9:52 pm

    Hah! Replicated it! (Copy and paste from the version of the dictionary with pictures: it does indeed seem to be the picture linked to the audio which is the culprit. The Google Drive pdf viewer does it too.)

    aadaade ᠪᠫᠬᠭᠮ v Frnpromettre, être d’accord, faire un contrat

    Just copying and pasting the audio symbol by itself gives ᠪ.

    Still very weird, though. Adobe pdf is an unholy mystery. (For example, the size of pdfs seems to bear no clear relationship to the actual visually-discernible content: not even when they’re searchable text as opposed to mere baggy pictures.)
43. Jerry Friedman says

    June 7, 2026 at 10:19 pm

    Oh, a little late, I see the category must be “herbaceous plants and vines”, not “herbaceous plants, specifically vines”. So never mind.
44. David Eddyshaw says

    June 7, 2026 at 10:21 pm

    the size of pdfs seems to bear no clear relationship to the actual visually-discernible content

    Hardly surprising if the damn thing is invisibly inserting the Mongolian alphabet multiple times into the document, I suppose …
45. Brett says

    June 7, 2026 at 10:55 pm

    The PDFLaTeX executable on my old office computer (a Mac) used to produce output PDF files two to three times larger than the equivalent program on my home (Windows) computer. Visually, the files were of course identical.
46. Stu Clayton says

    June 8, 2026 at 12:38 am

    @molly:
    [“Market” tout court actually doesn’t strike me as all that likely as a place name.]

    trawling wikipedia disambiguation pages and excluding city neighbourhoods

    de
    Markt (Biberbach), Ortsteil von Biberbach, Landkreis Augsburg, Bayern, mit Burg Markt
    Markt (Dornbirn), Bezirk von Dornbirn, Vorarlberg
    …
    

    These two instances of Markt are names of a city neighbourhood (Ortsteil in the case of Biberach) and ward (Bezirk in the case of Dornbirn). They are not place names, but the names of parts of places. This info is in the disambiguating text such as Ortsteil von Biberbach.

    I verified this claim with Google maps.
47. David Marjanović says

    June 8, 2026 at 8:29 am

    Burg Markt is impressive, though.
48. Athel Cornish-Bowden says

    June 8, 2026 at 11:54 am

    GT is crap at all African languages (even when it can cope with the script) wherever I’m in a position to tell.

    Does that include Hausa? I seem to recall from years ago when the world was young that I learned here at LanguageHat that Google Translate did a remarkably good job with Hausa, at a time when it was hopelessly bad with French and Spanish. The few tests that I did confirmed that translations from Hausa into English were always intelligible. (Since then it has improved beyond all recognition with French and Spanish.)
49. Athel Cornish-Bowden says

    June 8, 2026 at 11:59 am

    There’s a few towns in Blighty named “Market xxx”: Market Harborough, Market Weighton off the top of my head.

    Not to mention P. G. Wodehouse’s invention, Market Blandings.
50. ktschwarz says

    June 8, 2026 at 12:30 pm

    “Hausa translations are pretty good, actually”, said SFReader in 2015:

    https://languagehat.com/the-news-in-hausa/#comment-1577471

    Followed by comments speculating on why, but nobody else with knowledge of Hausa tried to corroborate how good it was. (No idea how much SFReader knew about Hausa.) Producing translations that are intelligible in English does *not* guarantee that they represent the Hausa accurately.
51. Trond Engen says

    June 8, 2026 at 12:32 pm

    Seong of Baekje: The closest I can think of is Köping in Sweden.

    Also Kaupanger and Koppang in Norway. Though admittedly, their functions as market venues were lost and preserved only as toponymic fossils before new villages appeared in the same good spots with 19th C. mass transit.
52. David Eddyshaw says

    June 8, 2026 at 12:39 pm

    Does that include Hausa?

    Hausa is better than most, no doubt because there is a lot more text out there to feed into the maw of the machine than with almost any other African language. It’s still pretty bad. It seems not to know basic vocabulary, and has no grasp of clause structure.

    I just tried it, fairly randomly, with Goro suke sayarwa, which it rendered “they are selling corn.” I suppose it deserves credit for recognising “sell”, and that the subject is “they” and that the tense/aspect is progressive; it misses the fact that this is a focus construction, which is perhaps forgiveable, but also mysteriously renders goro “kola nut” as “corn” …

    I tried to get it to translate “I can see a baobab tree” and got Ina iya ganin bishiyar baobab. Here, ina iya gani is really “I am able to see”, and a better rendering of the English idiom would be just na ga “I see” in the perfective; but baobab is just weird. (The Hausa for “baobab” is kuka.)

    On the other hand, it’s got the endings -n and -r right. These are very odd errors. No human being would mistranslate in just that way.
53. drasvi says

    June 8, 2026 at 12:59 pm

    Köping, Kaupanger, Koppang

    København:)
54. ktschwarz says

    June 8, 2026 at 1:09 pm

    OK, I see that Athel Cornish-Bowden later (2016) tried to test GT with a round-trip English-Hausa-English:

    https://languagehat.com/googles-interlingua/#comment-2577999

    SFReader’s result from that looks too good to be true to me, suggesting that Harry Potter was in the training material — really, an *exact* reproduction of a flowery literary phrase like “Of the many fearsome beasts and monsters that roam our land”? (Assisted, as John Cowan pointed out, by the fact that it didn’t actually translate “fearsome” … or “gigantic size”, or “toad”, or “venomous fangs”, etc.) You need to test it with fresh material, as David E was just doing.
55. Lars Mathiesen (he/him/his) says

    June 9, 2026 at 5:31 pm

    Köping/København: The latter has køpmanna somewhere inside, cognate to G Kaufmann but pl.gen. I think. But Denmark has at least three market towns named Nykøbing (on the islands of Mors; Falster and Sjælland, and distinguished by adding those to the name).

    The last of the –köpings on the E4 to Stockholm is also a Nyköping. (Jön-, Lin-, Norr- are the others).
56. Trond Engen says

    June 9, 2026 at 5:44 pm

    Interestingly, Uusikaupunki in Finland is Nystad in Swedish, not Nyköping. Of course, all of these are beside the point.
57. Trond Engen says

    June 9, 2026 at 5:53 pm

    There’s a number of British places called Chipping — about half of them described as a market town in the first line of the Wikipedia entry.
58. Brett says

    June 9, 2026 at 6:23 pm

    Market Chipping
    Chipping Cheddar
59. David Marjanović says

    June 10, 2026 at 8:44 am

    Uusikaupunki

    Finnish has borrowed kaupunki and made it productive.
60. Lars Mathiesen (he/him/his) says

    June 10, 2026 at 9:13 am

    Well, towns named for having a market is sort of the point innit.

    That said, in theory the Danish ones reflect their status as købstæder: royally privileged towns with an actual mayor and judge and protection for certain businesses. I suspect the Swedish köpingar reflect something similar: not quite städer but more than a village. But it seems that the Danish monarchy didn’t insist on enforcing that status (or rather, suppressing other market towns) until fairly late in the game, so I’m guessing the various -købinger may have gotten the privilege as an after-the-fact recognition of the facts on the ground.
61. Andreas Johansson says

    June 10, 2026 at 10:07 am

    Köping in Sweden used (until 1971) to be a legal status for local governments, intermediate between cities and rural municipalities.

    The four köpingar along the E4 that Lars mentions were however administratively all städer “cities” since the Middle Ages.
62. Trond Engen says

    June 10, 2026 at 3:32 pm

    Lars M.: Köping/København: The latter has køpmanna somewhere inside, cognate to G Kaufmann but pl.gen. I think.

    I think so too. But I’ll risk my neck and say that I’ve never quite accepted a (direct) derivation from Køpmannahafn. At the very least, that takes an irregular reduction of the first element – a clipping across constituent boundaries – which I find strange for such a transparent word. One alternative explanation could be a reinterpretation as køping- and subsequent ~regular reduction. Perhaps more likely is reinterpretation as LG køpen- “trade” v.inf. Or both could even be true at once.
63. Lars Mathiesen (he/him/his) says

    June 10, 2026 at 4:53 pm

    @Trond: Køpmannahafn is attested, I think, but of course that doesn’t preclude the existence of parallel forms that lead to København more directly. Occam’s Razor is not always the right tool, only most of the time, and in the absence of attested alternative forms it would seem hard to falsify the hypothesis that Køpmannahafn is the ancestral form.
64. drasvi says

    June 10, 2026 at 5:27 pm

    Back to Sakkwato:

    Of course, it is Sukkot. Compare al-fusTaaT for the meaning.

    In line with Delafosse’s (and maybe not only) opinion that Fula are Jewish.
65. Trond Engen says

    June 10, 2026 at 5:32 pm

    @Lars: Yes, I know it’s attested, and I didn’t mean to question the ultimate origin.

    I’ve thought of a development from [checking…] attested Køpmannæhafn through an intermediate form *Købmænhafn or some such, but I think that would yield ~**Kømmenhavn. From there one could perhaps invoke a “re-etymologization-by-folk” to København. But that’s an irregular process right there, and for some reason I find reinterpretation, perhaps by way of Low German, just as likely.
66. David Marjanović says

    June 10, 2026 at 5:45 pm

    Yet, the LG reinterpretation of -[haʊ̯n] as -/haɣən/ did not stick locally.
67. Trond Engen says

    June 11, 2026 at 2:37 am

    But /-hawn/ was transparent and descriptive, and /-hawen/ made less sense.

    Me: *Købmænhafn or some such, but I think that would yield ~**Kømmenhavn

    Counter-argument: *købmænhavn > *køw.n.hawn, which takes us close to the traditional local pronunciation. The reinterpretation, with or without LG as catalyst, would then be essentially orthographic and the /-b-/ restored from writing. Pretty straightforward.

    My problem with that is that there’s a /-p-/ in the inherited name in the other Scandinavian languages. That suggests that it was reinstated before the Danish lenition.
68. Lars Mathiesen (he/him/his) says

    June 11, 2026 at 4:00 am

    @Trond, of course købmand is [kʰøman] now. (The [m] may be ambisyllabic /mm/, but we don’t really hold with consonant length), so it wouldn’t really be strange to have Kømmenhavn. And yeah, it is eyecatching that only the Nordic countries have kept the ‘harbour’ morpheme and everybody else have gone with the LG interpretation.

    (The other pedestrian street in the city centre is now spelled Købmagergade, but originally it was Kiødmangeregade = ‘butcher street’. So once a word is worn down enough, folk spellings can win. Nobody knows what a købmager is so it’s a cranberry word, but note that it kept its /-r/. [The allomorph of /a/ before /ng/ is [ɑ], not [a], but in -mager it’s [a] until the last trace of the /g/ disappears and the /r/ turns it into [ɑ]. If you are posh enough, you can say [kʰømaɐg̥að] with four syllables]).