Ahydronym (fromGreek:ὕδρω,hydrō, "water" andὄνομα,onoma, "name") is a type oftoponym that designates aproper name of abody of water. Hydronyms include the proper names of rivers and streams, lakes and ponds, swamps and marshes, seas and oceans. As a subset oftoponymy, a distinctive discipline ofhydronymy (orhydronomastics) studies the proper names of all bodies of water, the origins and meanings of those names, and their development and transmission through history.[1]
Within theonomastic classification, main types of hydronyms are (in alphabetical order):
 | This sectionneeds additional citations forverification. Please helpimprove this article byadding citations to reliable sources in this section. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed.(April 2024) (Learn how and when to remove this message) |
Often, a given body of water will have several entirely different names given to it by different peoples living along its shores. For example,Tibetan:རྫ་ཆུ,Wylie:rDza chu,ZYPY:Za qu andThai:แม่น้ำโขง[mɛ̂ːnáːmkʰǒːŋ] are theTibetan andThai names, respectively, for the same river, theMekong insoutheast Asia. (The Tibetan name is used forthree other rivers as well.)
Hydronyms from various languages may all share a commonetymology. For example, theDanube,Don,Dniester,Dnieper, andDonets rivers all contain theScythian name for "river" (cf.don, "river, water" in modernOssetic).[7][8] A similar suggestion is that theYarden,Yarkon, andYarmouk (and possibly, with distortion,Yabbok and/orArnon) rivers in theIsrael/Jordan area contain theEgyptian word for river (itrw, transliterated in theBible asye'or).
It is also possible for atoponym to become a hydronym: for example, theRiver Liffey takes its name from the plain on which it stands, calledLiphe orLife; the river originally was calledAn Ruirthech.[9][10] An unusual example is theRiver Cam, which originally was called theGranta, but when the town ofGrantebrycge becameCambridge, the river's name changed to match the toponym. Another unusual example is theRiver Stort which is named after the town on the fordBishops Stortford rather than the town being named after the river.
Compared to most other toponyms, hydronyms are very conservative linguistically, and people who move to an area often retain the existing name of a body of water rather than rename it in their own language.[11] For example, theRhine inGermany bears aCeltic name, not aGerman name.[12]TheMississippi River in theUnited States bears anAnishinaabe name, not a French or English one.[13] The names of large rivers are even more conservative than the local names of small streams.
Therefore, hydronomy may be a tool used to reconstruct past cultural interactions, population movements, religious conversions, or older languages.[14] For example, history professorKenneth H. Jackson identified a river-name pattern against which to fit the story of theAnglo-Saxon invasion of Britain and pockets of surviving native British culture.[15] His river map of Britain divided the island into three principal areas of English settlement: the river valleys draining eastward in which surviving British names are limited to the largest rivers and Saxon settlement was early and dense; the highland spine; and a third region whose British hydronyms apply even to the smaller streams.
{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link){{cite web}}: CS1 maint: bot: original URL status unknown (link)