Comment by holgerschurig

5 hours ago

No, it means nothing. You shall not needlessly anglicize.

The name Hallstadt (not the two l letters) means Salt Town.

Or, actually "place". In a lot of location names of germanic origin "stadt" doesn't the current semantics, of being a town with > 10.000. More often than not it just means "place".

And "Hall" is an old term for salt. Many towns related to salt have it in their names, in many places of Germany and Austria. "Halle an der Saale" in Thüringen, Bad Reichenhall (Bayern), Hall im Tirol (Österreich), Schwäbisch-Hall (Baden-Württemberg) etc.

"Hall" is believed to be of celtic origin.

And the double l is important. German is a language where in the written form you look at the letters and you immediately see how it is spoken. A double vocal makes the speed slower, and a double consonant makes the speech faster. So "Halstadt" would be slow Hal (so more emphasize on the "a" instead), and "Hallstadt" would be a fast "Hall", similar in speed like the english "hell": little emphasize on the "a".

13 comments

holgerschurig

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bugake  3 hours ago

Medieval German didn't have fixed rules for writing. The same word was written in different ways on the same page, so many words inherited from the Middle Ages cannot be taken literally under modern writing rules.

flohofwoe  2 hours ago

> German is a language where in the written form you look at the letters and you immediately see how it is spoken.

Lol, written vs spoken German is just as ambigious as any other language with too few letters in the alphabet. Just look at "ich" vs "ach" (and then of course there's dozens of local dialects that don't even have spelling rules and would need even bigger alphabets if "done right").

  • freehorse  1 hour ago

    "You speak what you see" does not mean that every letter or combination of consonants is pronounced the same, but that there are clear rules that determine how every thing is spoken (with exceptions being rare). The fact that "ch" is pronounced differently depending on the vowel before is a consistent rule. In contrast in languages like english you do not have consistent rules like that for a big part of the language, to the extent that a native speaker encountering a new word (eg a street or town name) may not know how to speak or write it.

  • ahartmetz  1 hour ago

    No, not all languages are the same about the correlation of spelling and pronunciation. Of European languages, English is the least predictable, Spanish is the most predictable, and German is (about equidistant) between them. Spanish had a spelling reform the shortest time ago, English never had one.

    Source: Read it somewhere a long time ago, sorry.