Antecedent Generics: How Capes, Lakes, Mounts, and Points Are Named in the Antipodes

Abstract

Toponymic literature often mentions that the names of geographic features generally have the structure: specific + generic. While this is often the case, there are a set of geographic features that regularly do not follow this sequence. These are capes, lakes, mountains, and points. Their order of elements is often the reverse: generic + specific. By using toponyms from the Gazetteer of Australia and the New Zealand Gazetteer, this article shows there is indeed a distinct and suggestive pattern to the names that these features bear, explores this phenomenon and attempts to discover reasons for this trend.

Keywords:

• placename generics
• placename specifics
• Australia
• New Zealand
• cape
• lake
• mount
• point

Acknowledgements

I wish to thank David Blair on two counts: one, for helping with the retrieval of gazetteer material and putting it into a useable format; and two, for reading and commenting on a draft of this article. My gratitude must also go to the anonymous reviewers whose helpful comments made for a much improved article. All errors and omissions are mine.

Notes

1. There are other geographic features that also adhere to this naming principle, e.g. forts, ports, and gulfs etc.; however, too few of these exist in Australia and New Zealand, so it was deemed their small numbers would not be sufficient from which to draw any viable conclusions.

2. Except where indicated, all toponyms exemplified are from the Gazetteer of Australia or the New Zealand Gazetteer, and hence the spelling of some generics may not adhere to US spelling conventions (see: Geoscience Australia, n.d.; Intergovernmental Committee on Surveying and Mapping (ICSM), n.d.a; Land Information New Zealand, n.d.).

3. These gazetteers also include toponyms in the Antarctic territories of Australia and New Zealand, as well as their off-shore islands and territories.

4. The Scots and Irish Gaelic generics “loch” and “lough” were also included in the “lake” dataset because they are used in the same way as “lake.” The same applies to the Scots Gaelic “Ben,” although interestingly, the Glossary of Generic Terms (Committee for Geographical Names in Australasia (CGNA), 1996) does not recognize this as a feature designation.

5. New Zealand is a member of the CGNA, and hence its feature definitions are on a par with those of Australia, and its naming policies are very similar. The CGNA is a standing committee of the Intergovernmental Committee on Surveying and Mapping (ICSM). The former’s role is to coordinate place-naming activities across Australia and New Zealand, and to communicate the consistent use of placenames to ensure they meet the requirements of the whole community, including government bodies and emergency services, and indigenous people. The current CGNA is to be renamed the Permanent Committee on Place Names (PCPN).

6. Toponyms that commenced with the definite article (e.g. The Lake, The Blue Lake, The Mount, The Point etc.) were also excluded, as were ones that contained an of-prepositional phrase (e.g. Mount of Olives, Point of Chillon, Chain of Lakes etc.). The toponyms form a special class for which there is little consensus in any of the toponymic or grammatical literature on how to classify them. The of-prepositional phrase toponyms, I feel, either belong to a sub-category of the antecedent generic toponym type, and/or behave more like a noun phrase consisting of a common noun as its headword + a qualifying of-prepositional phrase. It is only by means of this construction that such generics can be antecedents to their specifics. Also excluded were toponyms that had a plural generic (e.g. Zig Zag Lakes, Snowy Mountains, and White Pup Points). These either did not exist for the generic cape, or were very few in number (e.g. only one for points). In addition, a plural generic either never or very rarely occurred as the first element of a toponym — Lakes Wooroonooke being the only example. It occurred only once with mountains, but had an of-prepositional phrase as a specific (Mountains of Jupiter) and referred to a mountain range.

7. The “dingo” (Canis lupus dingo) is Australia’s wild endemic dog.

8. The distinction between proper noun and proper name is still quite contentious. See for example the works by: Algeo (1973); Anderson (2007); Coates (2006, 2009); Frege (1960 [1892]); Gardiner (1954); Huddleston (1984); Kaplan (1979); Katz (2001); Kripke (1980); Mill (1843); Pulgram (1954); Russell (1905); Searle (1958); van Langendonck (2007); and Wittgenstein (1953); to name but a few. For simplicity’s sake, Huddleston’s (1984: 230) definition of proper noun and proper name will be employed: a “proper name is a full [noun phrase], not just a part of one — proper names are most often used to refer to the person, place, institution, etc. that bears the name,” and further, proper names “need not have proper nouns as heads,” e.g. Mount Kosciuszko and Lake George, and they are “institutionalised […] by some kind of registration.” Moreover, “[p]roper names are generally not listed in ordinary dictionaries because they do not have any meaning definable for the language as such.”

9. The ‘wombat’ (family Vombatidae) is an Australian marsupial, the ‘moa’ (order Dinornithiformes) is an extinct species of very large flightless bird, and the ‘kakapo’ (Strigops habroptilus) a large, flightless, nocturnal, ground-dwelling parrot, both endemic to New Zealand.

10. Mountain Creek Yard is designated a mountain, not as its name would suggest a yard (i.e. an enclosure forming a pen for livestock etc.; a stockyard), with the specific Mountain Creek. Its specific is Creek Yard.

11. Oxford English Dictionary: Mountain < Anglo-Norman montain, montaine, mountaine, muntaine, muntaigne, etc., and Old French montaigne, montangne, etc. Mountain < Latin mont- , mōns mount + -ānus -ane suffix. Mount (in early use) < classical Latin mont-, mōns mountain, hill, towering heap or mass; subsequently reinforced by Anglo-Norman munt, mund, mont, mount and Old French, Middle French, French mont mountain, hill (late 10th cent.) < classical Latin mont-, mōns.

12. See Guidelines for the Consistent Use of Place Names, available at: http://www.icsm.gov.au/cgna/consistent_place_names_guidelines.pdf.

13. This is indeed how Zinkin (1969: 187) views ‘Generic’ X type toponyms.