Question on linguistic substrata and their geographic ranges

[Porphyrogenitos]

I'm a senior undergraduate in geography, though I'm minoring in linguistics and looking to go to grad school in linguistics.

For a capstone project, I'm attempting to analyze the spatial distribution of English place names of Native American origin in Ohio, by language and language family.

The raw output of this research - the delineation of areas where toponyms originating from Shawnee, Erie, Wyandot, etc. predominate - would have, I am sure, a certain significance, but I am not sure how exactly I would explain or describe it. I would hope to gain greater insight into the pre-contact distribution of Native American groups in Ohio, or rather, the areas in which Europeans interacted with them and thus adopted their place names.

I've been reading more about linguistic substrata, and I think I realize that's what I'm dealing with. However, my object of study is more the geographical distribution of the substratum, and not the languages themselves. For example, I know that the former range of Basque is known from the substrate toponyms found in areas that now speak Catalan and Spanish. Or, for example, Ante Aikio discusses in this paper how the ancient range of Saami settlement in Finland can be detected from Saami substrate toponyms.

So, my question is - when toponyms originating from a linguistic substrate can be used to delineate an area in which the substrate was once spoken, what is that area called? Is there even a name for it? I've done searches on various resources for "geographic linguistic substrate", "toponym substrate", etc. but I haven't found anything specifically addressing this.

Any help would be appreciated. Thanks.

[k1234567890y]

Maybe you can use wikipedia as an assisting tool? look up the articles about the place names of Ohio?

So, my question is - when toponyms originating from a linguistic substrate can be used to delineate an area in which the substrate was once spoken, what is that area called? Is there even a name for it? I've done searches on various resources for "geographic linguistic substrate", "toponym substrate", etc. but I haven't found anything specifically addressing this.

Maybe you can coin a word and give a definition, like "substratum area"?

[Salmoneus]

A warning: in the case of US placenames, many of them are not geographically linked to their substratum origin.

I think you've got six major possibilities:
1. settlers adopt the native name for a place
2. settlers adopt a native place name, but apply it to the wrong place
3. settlers adopt a place name used by one group for a location controlled by a different group (eg, aliens landing on Earth might call Moscow 'Moscow', not because Moscow is inhabited by people who call it 'Moscow', but because the aliens first make contact with English speakers who call it 'Moscow'...)
4. settlers adopt a place name, but apply it to a randomly-selected place hundreds of miles from its place of origin - here, the sound of the name has been borrowed, but no element of its meaning, or at least not an obvious element of its meaning .
5. in a second wave of migration, settlers name a new place after a place settled earlier that happened to have a native name.
6. settlers just make up a name that sounds native



e.g. :
- 'Iowa' is named after the Iowa tribe of Iowa. However, 'Iowa' is not an Iowa word, it's a Dakota word, and they called themselves something totaly different
- the state of 'Mississippi' takes its name from an Ojibwe word - first applied to the river, then to an area next to that river that was nowhere near any Ojibwe speakers...
- combining these two confusions, 'Missouri' is the interpretation of the Illinois word for a canoe, which the Illinois used to refer to the Missouri people. Europeans took this as the name of the Missouri, and then applied it to the river near where those people lived, and then to a region bordering that river...
- 'Wyoming' is a name in a language spoken in the region of New Jersey. Europeans used it to name a valley in Pennsylvania. The state of Wyoming, on the far side of the continent, was then named after that valley, possibly because of a famous song about a battle fought there
- 'Idaho' seems to be a random set of sounds invented to sound like a native word - some people now specifically believe it's an Apache word.

[Porphyrogenitos]

Maybe you can use wikipedia as an assisting tool? look up the articles about the place names of Ohio?

So, my question is - when toponyms originating from a linguistic substrate can be used to delineate an area in which the substrate was once spoken, what is that area called? Is there even a name for it? I've done searches on various resources for "geographic linguistic substrate", "toponym substrate", etc. but I haven't found anything specifically addressing this.

Maybe you can coin a word and give a definition, like "substratum area"?

I've been using Wikipedia and other informal sources as a starting-off point, but I've obtained academic sources for the place name etymologies at this point. And yeah, I may end up coining a term like that for the sake of abbreviation.

A warning: in the case of US placenames, many of them are not geographically linked to their substratum origin.

[...]

Thanks for the response. Yep, I've been doing research on the topic and I'm armed with William Bright's etymological dictionary Native American Placenames of the United States. I'm aware of the big mess that is US toponymy, and I'm going to be careful to filter out the cases you've mentioned as best as I can. I'll be assigning "language of origin" to toponyms based strictly on the language English speakers directly borrowed it from - so, for example, Delaware County in Ohio, despite being named after the Delaware people, will not be considered a place name of Native American origin since "Delaware" is an English term of English origin. And the town of Toronto, Ohio will not be counted, either - its name was taken from the English place name "Toronto" used in Canada, whose origin is then Mohawk.

I'll also be counting loan translations/calques - for example, the name of the Great Miami River originates from the Shawnee msimiyamiθiipi, "Great Miami River".

This way, I hope to get the best picture of the extent of substrate influence on AmEng in Ohio, and thus gain insight into the areas where English-speaking Europeans interacted with speakers of various Native American languages.