895: Strasbourg, and Other City-Names May 21, 2017

If you look on a map of the United States you would see a lot of cities named after other places that already exist. There is, for example, St. Petersburg in Florida, Berlin in three different states, and a few Cairos and Delhis as well. With the exception of some names derived from indigenous American tribes, such as Miami and Tallahassee in Florida, there is not too much linguistic reasoning. In other places, there can be a few clues, such as with Brčko, which based off of the lack of many vowels and the inverted circumflex over the C, one might guess this is in Eastern Europe; it is in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Places ending with '-burg' or variations thereof tend to be in Germanic-speaking regions, but 'Strasbourg' is a city in France, and not only has the Germanic ending, but also the 'Stras-' is a cognate with the German 'Straße' ('street'). It would be easy to mistake this for a German city, not helped by the fact that there is an central Austrian town, Straßburg. This is due to the French city's name originating from when it was part of the Holy Roman Empire after being an important area in Gaul.