Talk:Hants

Tea room discussion

Note: the below discussion was moved from the Wiktionary:Tea room.

Should this be capitalised at Hants (or even Hants.)? --Borganised 11:42, 18 September 2008 (UTC)

Indeed. I moved it. It had been converted to lower case by a bot long ago. I couldn't find evidence of its use in lower case. Perhaps it is spelled that way, too. We left-ponders need the upper case entry for snail mail, though the entry needs at least a link to Hampshire or w:Hampshire.

I think we have adopted the standard of not necessarily having the period following an abbreviation, in line with more modern European practice. It would make like simpler for us not to have "alternative spelling" entries for abbreviations that differed only by the presence or absence of a period. DCDuring TALK 12:25, 18 September 2008 (UTC)

Hantum or Hamtun?

Is it possible that our source made a transposition error by typing Hantum instead of Hamtun? Metathesis happens, but it seems it would be unusual if the second element of the name was the familiar -tun meaning town. Of course, we dont explicitly say that the -tun part means town, but we imply it on our Hampshire page by simply not mentioning it and saying the name comes from ham + shire. And apart from Hampton being a well-known name on its own, Old English tūn indeed means town. This looks like quite a tangled mess, so I will look into this before I go to the ES or anywhere else. —Soap— 13:08, 6 July 2023 (UTC)

I think a shift of /mps/ > /nts/ is plausible enough given that it's a placename people would have said over and over. As for ham, it might be hām "home". So the placename would be "home town shire" taken at face value. But the first part is just speculation, since it could as well be that there was some preexisting placename Hām that only by happenstance coalesced with the word for home. —Soap— 13:12, 6 July 2023 (UTC)

Noting that it would actually seem to be /mt/ > /nt/, which is equally plausible if not more so, although it also implies a separate loss of the original /n/.—Soap— 14:25, 6 July 2023 (UTC)