On the -ins and the -yns

While we wait for something more interesting to post we thought it would be fun to have our interns perform a few hundred hours of mind-bogglingly boring work. It turns out it was fun and while the interns are now sleeping it off, we will demonstrate to you a map of Europe that they worked on day & night during the last week.

The map shows most (not all – blame the interns) towns and geographic names in Europe that contain the suffix -in.  We went by the spelling except where the name clearly was to be read as an -in, such as -yn or -een.  We did not include place names that had a clear personal name in them such as Augustine, Quentin, etc.

In the first version we did not include any -inos or -inas or -inis (-inos are very popular in Russia but there are plenty of -ins there too) .  Speaking of suffixes with an “n” and a vowel, we also did not include the -ens which are more often than not Germanic.

We thought this may be interesting because, at least in Central and East Europe the suffix -in is typically associated with Slavs (e.g., Berlin).

If you are wondering about all those dots in northern France by Calais, they may be of the Morini.  Morin is obviously also a name ending in -in and refers to people who dwell by the sea.  The name for sea, i.e., Latin mare is Indo-European but only in Celtic and Slavic is it expressed with an “o” – compare old Slavic morje or today’s morze or Welsh môr or Breton and Cornish mor with the Germanic mar, marsh or Latin mare.

BTW the Morini participated together with other coastal people and certain tribes from Britain, in the uprising of the Gallic Veneti (see Caesar’s Gallic War Book III, 9 & 10).

Here is another run with the -inos, -ynos, -inas and -ynas.

We note that this is entirely unscientific since it does not take into account the etymological background of the prefixes and for a whole host of other reasons.  Nevertheless, we thought it would be fun to torture the interns this way and, it turns out, it was.  Now let us all enjoy the fruits of their labours while they recover in preparation for more backbreaking work.

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