I’ve always been slightly amused by Australian place names. I find myself imagining the cartographic conference where questions were asked such as “So, Bruce, what shall we call this great sandy desert?” or “What about these northern territories, Bruce, they’re going to need a name too. Not to mention these snowy mountains.”
This is terribly amusing until you buy a book on the meaning of English place names, which are almost all just as dull. Most places are simply somewhere belonging to someone. Birmingham, for example, is the Beorma ingas ham meaning home of the sons of Beorma. Cambridge is the bridge over the Cam. I once spent a childhood car journey looking up every village we passed and would take a guess that 95% of places are like that.
And the same is true of the remote and exotic. If I started this post by laughing at the Australians calling some snowy mountains the Snowy Mountains, guess what Himalayas means? The abode of snow.
In fact I’m having trouble thinking of a single interesting place name at the moment. So instead I’ll tell you that almost all western place names are written down phonetically in Chinese for obvious reasons. Oxford is the only one (I was once told by a sinologist) with its own pictogram. Just as dawn in Chinese is written as the symbol of the sun over the symbol for a tree, so Oxford is the symbol for a river with the symbol for an ox.