Tolkien studied languages, so he would’ve understood and probably appreciated how often things are named purely based on what they do or their immediate aesthetic values. Language is all about communication after all. Sometimes that necessitates complexity, but it should always be as simple as possible without sacrificing nuance.
In fairness, Mount Doom has multiple different names. Source: Finished the Silmarillion for the first time last night. :)
Orodruin, Amon Amarth, Mount Doom.
Yeah, it’s like The Grand Canyon has a bunch of other names, but the one we stuck with is just: “The grand canyon. You know which one I’m talking about.” Sometimes the boring but obvious name works. It’s more believable that the people in this world renamed stuff to something obvious.
I used to parrot the “created multiple languages, named the place Mount Doom” meme up until I started getting deeper into Tolkien lore. Now I’m the obnoxious one that points out all the other names for Mount Doom, as well as translating other “cooler” names to show that they’re all similarly named (my favorite being Khazad Dum, or “Dwarf Hall”, followed by Cirith Ungol, or “Spider Cleft”).
This is also fairly common in real life, for example, this map of Japan with the Prefectures translated to English.
I want to go to How Good? now to find out.
I think this is the same in pretty much every country (well, once you add in people’s names, like Jacksonville or Virginia), but it’s a little more difficult to find because you have to use an etymology dictionary instead of just looking up the meaning of Chinese characters in a regular dictionary of that language because they’re are still in current use.
For example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_Kingdom_county_name_etymologies?wprov=sfla1
On my way to Capital City.
Got to stop at How? Good on the way
