Friday 7 October 2011

korkenzieher or exonymy

I remember when I was little, I had a light and fluffy block of cork wood that I thought was a very rare and exotic thing as part of a larger collection of stones, fossils and pieces of petrified wood. It was eaten with wormholes, and I think I only tried once floating it in the bathtub. Such an unusual grove must have its origins with the Irish second-city of the same name, I was convinced.

Of course, since then I learned that the cork oak is mostly cultivated in Portugal and the city is derived from the Irish Corcaigh for marshland and that wine corks are mostly plastic or rubber anymore--which is nice to a certain extent since one need not be as practiced at uncorking a bottle because the rubber stopper is not brittle and won't break apart into the bottle, but we did notice this unsung and ingenious hybrid that has a bit of plastic as a catchment for a tradition, fragile cork. It's strange how exonyms and making aboriginal place names sensible to foreign ears--or those of settlers to natives--can result in some creative folk etymology. The German (and of course Germany for Deutschland is one of the more prevalent exonyms and an invention of Julius Caesar) town of Pforzheim, for instance, is called so as a reduction, simplification of the Roman designation of Porta Hercynia, gateway to the ancient pan-European forest that remains as the Black Forest (der Schwarzwald) into modern times. Even a place named something seemingly straightforward, like Schweinfurt, having evolved from Suinurde (maybe meaning "man's land" or "divided land", connotes nothing about a place where pigs can cross the Main river. Such backformations have surprising and triangulated origins.