Just one of those things

[Viking]

There are some places that bizarrely have the same name. Places that obviously are not named after each other (like so many places where colonies were planted were named)

There is a Vyborg in both Russia and Denmark, Brest in France and Belarus, Galicia in Spain and Ukraine, Thebes in Greece and Egypt, Iberia in Iberia and Georgia, Albania in Albania and Georgia, Caen and Cannes in France.

It feels a bit like a Scotsman going to Japan would feel like if he found a small village called "Edinburgh".

[Ideologue]

The Galicias are related, though.

[Barrister]

You didn't even mention perhaps the most famous one - the state of Georgia and the nation of Georgia.


That was something I found funny when I toured around Scotland many years ago.  There are a great many places in Canada that were directly named after places in Scotland, but in the time since those connections have been long forgotten.  I used to live very close to a little hamlet in Alberta named Mallaig.  I had no idea that it was named after a Scottish fishing village of the same name.  Mallaig, AB being thousands of kms inland was nothing at all like Mallaig, Scotland.

[Razgovory]

Well with the Egypt thing the Greeks gave named both places.  The Egyptians called it something different.

[The Brain]

Ah Swedish Viborg, for centuries bulwark of the west against the hordes of the east... :wistful:

Now Slavs pick through the ruins of a once great civilization.

[Sheilbh]

There's loads in the British Isles-US. See the beautiful town of Baltimore in Cork:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baltimore,_County_Cork

What's weird is when I come across a British town whose name I knew because of its more famous American cousin. For example I remember meeting someone from Boston, Lincolnshire which I had no idea existed:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boston,_Lincolnshire
Similarly there's a by-election going on in Newark, which again I didn't realise was a British town:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newark-on-Trent

All of these make sense and I realise I probably should expect any famous American city to have a British counterpart but they both surprised me when I heard them for the first time.

[The Brain]

There's loads in the British Isles-US. See the beautiful town of Baltimore in Cork:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baltimore,_County_Cork

What's weird is when I come across a British town whose name I knew because of its more famous American cousin. For example I remember meeting someone from Boston, Lincolnshire which I had no idea existed:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boston,_Lincolnshire
Similarly there's a by-election going on in Newark, which again I didn't realise was a British town:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newark-on-Trent

All of these make sense and I realise I probably should expect any famous American city to have a British counterpart but they both surprised me when I heard them for the first time.

Some of these may be the result of colonialism.

[The Larch]

The Galicias are related, though.

How so? AFAIK the Ukranian one is a latinization of a local slavic name, which in turn comes from an obscure steppe tribe from the High middle ages (paging Spellus!) that had links with the Magyars and Khazars. My Galicia comes from the latinized name of a Celtic tribe that settled here before the Romans came.

[MadImmortalMan]

Probably very few of those are what Vikes means by totally unrelated. Pretty much everywhere in the US is named after a place on another continent as mentioned above or just use the previous names the natives had for it. Grafton, Mass was named after a street in Dublin. There's a Cairo in Illinois FFS. 


AU/NZ/CA, same thing.

Georgia/Georgia might be a good one.

Something like Waterford has an obvious explanation why two unrelated places might share it. Just geographical similarities. Those are probably the most common.

[The Larch]

As expected, there are loads of cities in the Americas named after Spanish ones. Just in the US off the top of my head there's Toledo, Laredo and Albuquerque. There's a county in Indiana with the same name than my hometown, but the origin is unrelated.

[Barrister]

Something like Waterford has an obvious explanation why two unrelated places might share it. Just geographical similarities. Those are probably the most common.

One of my favourite places to go in Whitehorse was a little lake outside of town called Fish Lake.

How many lakes are named Fish Lake around the world? 

Hell - I just found that Wiki has a (very long) list of some of them!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_lakes_named_Fish_Lake

[Ideologue]

The Galicias are related, though.

How so? AFAIK the Ukranian one is a latinization of a local slavic name, which in turn comes from an obscure steppe tribe from the High middle ages (paging Spellus!) that had links with the Magyars and Khazars. My Galicia comes from the latinized name of a Celtic tribe that settled here before the Romans came.

I thought Galicia was also named after Gauls.  Maybe I'm confusing it with Galatia in Asia Minor.

[Viking]

Something like Waterford has an obvious explanation why two unrelated places might share it. Just geographical similarities. Those are probably the most common.

One of my favourite places to go in Whitehorse was a little lake outside of town called Fish Lake.

How many lakes are named Fish Lake around the world? 

Hell - I just found that Wiki has a (very long) list of some of them!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_lakes_named_Fish_Lake

There is a similar problem in iceland where almost all the rivers in the country are named either

Llaxá or Jökulsá with the significant difference being that the Laxás are from rain water (and consequently have fish in them) while the Jökulsás are glacial run-offs and have periodic flash floods that wash all vegitation and animal life in the river into the ocean, and consequently have no fish. As all Jews know Lax is icelandic for Salmon.

[HVC]

The one I found funny as a kid was turkey and Peru, because Peru is name of a turkey (bird) in Portuguese.

[CountDeMoney]

I think it's kinda weird that Arras is a town in France, and yet it's my German grandfather's name, and the name goes as far back as 938 AD in Baden-Württemberg, which used to have its own Arras Festival back in the day.  Other than regional bleed-over over the centuries, never quite figured out how all that came together.