Why do we not know what some places mean?
As I wrote about in this post, previously given place names may continue to be used even by those who have no knowledge of the naming language or the original meaning. George R. Stewart attributes this phenomenon to the fact that “the giving of new names is an act of labor” (1975, p. 53) and it is often easier to use names that are already in place than it is to create new ones. Multiple groups of people using multiple…