Page:Essays and studies; by members of the English Association, volume 1.djvu/42

 out in the later forms, but in many names it still remains, especially before a vowel or h, as in Tuican hom, now Twickenham. The northern dialect, which extended to the southern border of Yorkshire, was characterized by having -a (or some other vowel) wherever the other dialects had -an as a grammatical termination. It is noteworthy that this difference of dialect is traceable in the modern forms of local names, those which contain an inflexional n being found quite close to the Yorkshire border, but not within it. There are two villages a few miles apart, one in Yorkshire and the other in Derbyshire, which have names etymologically identical, meaning 'the high lea'; but the name of the Derbyshire village is Handley (formerly Hanley, æt hēan lēage), while the Yorkshire village is called Heeley. Another point of difference between Old English dialects is that in the north the ending -es of the genitive had, at least as early as the tenth century, come to be often extended from the masculine and neuter nouns to those of the feminine gender. Hence, while the word gāt, she-goat, had in the south gāte as its genitive form, the modern name of the place called by Bæda Ad Caprae Caput is Gateshead.

The names left us by the Danes and Norsemen are of great historical importance, because it is from their evidence, aided by that of local dialects, that we can determine what parts of the country were most abundantly settled by those peoples. The ending -by, as in Derby, Whitby, is always the mark of a place once inhabited by Scandinavians; and so is the ending thwaite, which is the Old Norse thveit, a paddock. The word thorp, a village, was Old English as well as Scandinavian; but the Norsemen made more frequent use of it than did the English.

The Danish names of places are formed on much the same principles as those of the native English. Many of these are from names of persons, and some of these have become curiously altered in pronunciation. Geirwind's 'by'