Tautological Geography
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WHAT ARE GEOGRAPHICAL TAUTOLOGIES?
When a place name is redundant. For example, in Spanish, Los Angeles means “The Angels”, so the baseball team The Los Angeles Angels actually means “The The Angels Angels”. The Gobi means desert in English. Therefore Gobi Desert translates to “Desert Desert” The infographic below shows the same thing, but with geographical locations instead of sports teams compared.
HOW DO THESE TAUTOLOGIES COME ABOUT?
History and different languages. The main geographic tautologies in English occurred when European colonizers or explorers combined a geographical term with a local word for the area. Often these would coincide, as they were being named after the same geographical feature, and that causes redundancy.
WHAT’S IN THIS INFOGRAPHIC?
With the exception of Pendleton Hill, Connecticut (which was too interesting to resist), included are only the major areas most people have heard of. Orange designates deserts, green denotes land, and blue is for water.
Source: www.etymologynerd.com
If you count river basins tautologies cover about 3.3 percent of the Earth’s surface.
Petrarch1603
Nice list! There is another example in Spain: the Valley of Aran, in Catalonia. Aran means valley in Basque.
You could add all River Avons as well.
Wow, I made that! Thank you so much for including my graphic.