Aesthetic City Names

[inthesomeday]

The first city in California I lived in, Escondido, has a lovely name

 

[Lexicus]

I like Palmyra as well, and Artaxarta, the capital of the Armenian faction in Rome: Total War.

 

[Kyriakos]

Pergamon, Laodikeia, Ekatompylos (which also means something cool; literally "(city with) one hundred gates", but it was a common synekdoche: any city with more than four gates was called that, for example Thebes, which famously had seven gates), Knossos, Phaistos, Metapontion, etc

 

[Traitorfish]

Can you write out a Hunnic pronunciation guide for it

In Standard English, it would come out as "Tie-na-broo-ick", but it's properly pronounced something closer to "Tay-neh-bru-ich", with a characteristically short Scottish "ooh", and a hard "-ch" left just a little softer, a little less rasping, than you might find in German. All pronounced, ideally, with a Hebridean lilt.

 

[luiz]

As stated in the zombie thread: my city is called Palmdale, notable since there are no palm trees. It was named by some ditz that saw the native joshua trees and thought they were palm trees. Maybe not aesthetic, but 'named in error' is at least unusual, if not unique.

My city is named River of January because the early Portuguese explorers thought Guanabara Bay was a river (and they arrived in January).

 

[Timsup2nothin]

My city is named River of January because the early Portuguese explorers thought Guanabara Bay was a river (and they arrived in January).

My brother!

 

[hobbsyoyo]

To be honest there are a lot cooler/more impressive historical sites to visit than Cahokia.

Following up on this -

I just read an article from the Smithsonian that makes the case that when whites first showed up at Cahokia (and continuing until fairly recently), they disbelieved that they were created by the same groups of Native Americans that lived in the area. They assumed it was some advanced, ancient lost civilization like Atlantis that must have done it.

 

[luiz]

My brother!

I have a soft spot for poorly named cities as well. I once visited one called "Big Beach" - but there was no beach, nor is anything big about it. It's known locally as the "city of the two lies" . I visited this place some 15 years ago, and still have fond memories

 

[Traitorfish]

Following up on this -

I just read an article from the Smithsonian that makes the case that when whites first showed up at Cahokia (and continuing until fairly recently), they disbelieved that they were created by the same groups of Native Americans that lived in the area. They assumed it was some advanced, ancient lost civilization like Atlantis that must have done it.

Their first guess was actually the Welsh, of all people. Some of them genuinely expected to find a lost tribe of Welshmen in the American interior, possibly riding the mastodons which they also assumed were still somewhere over the Mississippi.

In fairness, they weren't exactly wrong, in that the mound had been created by a lost civilisation, it's just that it didn't occur to them that the locals were the descendants of the lost civilisation. And it's not necessarily racism, because Europeans routinely made this same mistake about themselves: the Greeks, famously, forgot that their ancestors had built the great palaces of the Mycenaean era, and came to the reasonable conclusion that it was probably cyclopses. Cultural change was something that people in the pre-modern and even early modern times really struggled to comprehend, especially when that change appeared appeared to go, by the standards of the time, "backwards".

 

[Timsup2nothin]

Whenever I see an abandoned house out in the desert my first instinct is always "I bet a cyclops built that."

 

[Kyriakos]

Well, Cyclopae would be big enough to build huge walls without trying much - though apparently they mostly wanted to herd sheep, and occasionally eat any human who would visit their island.

 

[Timsup2nothin]

Well, Cyclopae would be big enough to build huge walls without trying much - though apparently they mostly wanted to herd sheep, and occasionally eat any human who would visit their island.

Which begs the question...why would they build walls in the first place. Herding sheep is not exactly a hotbed of motives for building walls. And islands sort of have a more effective boundary built right in.

 

[Kyriakos]

Which begs the question...why would they build walls in the first place. Herding sheep is not exactly a hotbed of motives for building walls. And islands sort of have a more effective boundary built right in.

Maybe the gods asked them to; afterall, both in homeric and hesiodic religious tradition the cyclopae have divine heritage ^^

Alternatively: maybe their sheep also were huge (and had one eye) so they needed a wall.

 

[Takhisis]

In Standard English, it would come out as "Tie-na-broo-ick", but it's properly pronounced something closer to "Tay-neh-bru-ich", with a characteristically short Scottish "ooh", and a hard "-ch" left just a little softer, a little less rasping, than you might find in German. All pronounced, ideally, with a Hebridean lilt.

But in standard Gaelic orthography a t followed by an I is more of an English ‘ch’ sound.

 

[Manfred Belheim]

Grimsby

 

[stfoskey12]

I like the sound of a lot of Russian cities like Vladivostok, Verkhoyansk, Oymakon, Yakutsk, Irkutsk, Petropavlosk-Kamchatsky, Novosibirsk, Kyzyl, Murmansk, etc. The Canadian Arctic has some cool place names like Iqaluit, Tuktoyaktuk, and Pangnirtung.
In the U.S. I like the sound of Minneapolis, Philadelphia, Shreveport, Missoula, and Oshkosh.
Others:
Reykjavik
Guadalajara
Khartoum
Mogadishu
Ashgabat
Bishkek
Tashkent
Zagreb
Hamerfest
Kathmandu

 

[Kyriakos]

Omsk bird

 

[Broken_Erika]

Which begs the question...why would they build walls in the first place. Herding sheep is not exactly a hotbed of motives for building walls. And islands sort of have a more effective boundary built right in.

It's their hobby. Everyone's gotta have a hobby.

 

[Gori the Grey]

Which begs the question...why would they build walls in the first place.

They didn't. They lived in caves. Their lack of civilization is like the thing about them in the Odyssey.

 

[inthesomeday]

I actually find both the native and Spanish name for the city on the lake to be very beautiful— of course the latter just comes from a name the native people there had for themselves.

Tenochtitlan and México