Canehan comes into the name of the blog because it’s the village where we have our country house in northern France.
Originally the house was faced in rotting weatherboard, and consisted only for three tiny rooms in the centre, one end being a cow shed and the other a chicken run. One bare light bulb hung in each room, and there was no running water – a rainwater cistern and a thunderbox in the back garden. A lot of blood, sweat etc, plus gobs of money over the years, went into it. I suppose we bought it because of the wonderful six-foot-square fireplace – discovering afterwards that the chimney above the ceiling had been replaced by a tin pipe. 400 bricks later …
The photo at the head of the blog was taken in the back garden and is meant to symbolize my favourite pasttime, rosé on a summer’s evening in our garden, and give a clue to one of my two nationalities…. I would have put an edelweiss on the table if I could have found one.
The village name is variously pronounced Can-eh/-on, or locally the more slurred Can-on. When the nearby town of Eu – in French only, I’m afraid – celebrated the 900th anniversary of its founding, our village thought it should look into its history. Someone discovered (or decided) that the name was originally Norse, from Kanne=pot and ham=village. I’ve no idea if that is true, but the previously unnamed main street became the rue des Potiers, and for some years, we had an annual pottery fair.
the previously unnamed main street
Wow, that’s amazing! Now I have to wrap my mind around the concept of a main street without a name. My dad always said it was too bad I’d grown up only in big cities…
Not unusual in small French villages. Even more fun: one day, before the Naming of Parts, a standardised street number was attached to our gate. When I asked the mayor what street name went with the number, he said there wasn’t one. “Would rue Principale do?” I asked. “Fine,” he said. And it was thus until the formal naming ….
Our address is still simply “Le Village, Canehan” in many older databases.
[…] What’s a “Canehan” and how do you pronounce it? He explains that all here. […]
You just say “Northern France”, but you are obviously in Normandy (it’s no coincidence that the traditional manner of building is the same in Normandy and in England, except for the colour: whitewashing and black in England). You have done a lovely job with the buildings. And I would guess that the word “village” means different things to different people: I would be surprised if Canehan had more than, say, 500 inhabitants at the most., which is why there was no name for the main street – just as in many places the major river does not have a name (or it is not used locally), it’s just “the river”. In fact, even in English “Main street” is not really a name, just the local designation. Neither is “Grand Rue” (lit. ‘big street’), the medieval French equivalent, a name left over in many French towns. Canehan is obviously too small to have had a “Grand Rue”.
Yes, we are in Normandy, but Upper Normandie -in the Seine-Maritime, about 10 kms from the border with Picardie. And you are quite right about the size of the village, the whole commune boasts 313 inhabitants at the last count. Most along the straggling main street/road, a few in a couple of hamlets. You will understand, M-L, when we sometimes talk about something happening dans le pays, meaning village, not the whole country/nation as it would appear if you hadn’t been exposed to this country usage.
I’ve been advised to drop the photos and some other details of our house. Hope you enoyed them.
I came here two days ago by order of the Crown and have been thinking about the name ever since. I don’t believe in the Old Norse explanation. Or rather: I don’t believe in that ON explanation since I can’t find examples of the word kanna “jug” used descriptive, either in toponyms or as a byname. But there’s a kani “bowl; sled; (in Danish) boat” that is used for both.
The byname explanation is possible, but unprovable. The landscape description hypothesis can be investigated a little further. As a first element in Norwegian placenames it’s said to denote a shallow depression. I’ve found the village on Google Earth and several online maps, and I gather that it’s situated on the top of the tip of a ridge between the coastal plain and the valley of the Yères. That doesn’t seem to fit with a bowl. But since names in Normandy would rather have been set by Danes, or so I believe, the meaning may be “boat”. Could this ridge have been likened with a turned boat or a keel?
But I’m far from certain. The Wikipedia article makes no mention of a Scandinavian origin, just OE -ham, a cognate of heimr, and the Biblical Cana’an. Both seem reasonable to me.
[I even tried to find your house on the satellite photo to see if I guessed the cardinal directions and the time of day correctly. I gave up, but I suppose it confirms that you were well advised to take the photo down.]
What do you mean, drop the photos? How else can people get the flavour of where you live? I am very disappointed. Other people get to put on lots of photos (Nijma, AJP, SiganusK), why not you? Readers can skip the photos if they want. I am a visual person, I like photos. And this is your blog: you get to put on all the photos you want. Don’t pay attention to the rabat-joies.
“le pays” meaning the village: This is quite common everywhere: I would refer to Canehan as “un petit pays” and everyone would understand that it is a village, not a country. Similarly if someone says something happened “dans le pays”, they would mean the village and immediate surroundings.
Trond: Does the Danish first meaning, bowl, mean bowl in the sense of a pottery bowl, rather than a depression in the earth ? Then perhaps that would fit the “village of pottery” idea.
Locally, we are said to be on a plateau, rather than a ridge – a group of local churches is called the parish of the plateau, so I don’t see the upturned keel idea. Visually it’s not like that.
I’d not seen the Quid explanation of the etymology before – very interesting, I’ll explore further
Marie-Lucie: Sorry about the photos, I liked them too. But Trond explains exactly why I was advised to take them down. Too easy for people to locate … Yes, I suppose it is a bit rabat-joie, but we live in depressing times.
I can see the plateau, extending far to the south and southwest, but I thought the northern rather sharp tip of it might be perceived more like a ridge by someone coming up along the Yères. But you’d certainly know that better than me!
I was in doubt about the translation of kani, partly because the word is lost in the modern language so I have no feeling for the nuances beyond the dictionary gloss ‘skål’, partly because ‘skål’ has no exact match in English (that I can think of). I chose “bowl” but might as well have said “saucer”. I don’t think of it as pottery, but that’s because it denotes wooden objects in its two other meanings.
Also: The glossing of kanna as “jug” is a bit awkward. It’s the same word as English ‘can’ “metal container”, an early loan from Latin. The primary property is being a pouring vessel. I don’t think of it as pottery, rather metal or, by means of modern technology, plastic. A ceramic teapot, however, is a ‘tekanne’, probably by extension from metal kettles (‘kaffekanne’).
Trond: I take your point about wood and metal, not pottery. The original name “Kenchan”, quoted in Quid, could lead almost anywhere, a linguist’s delight …
Yes, certainly that northern end of the village ends quite sharply. There is a superb view from the churchyard into the valley of the Yeres. So nice a view that I’ve always thought I’d like to be buried there ….
Trond figured out exactly where I live after five minutes of reading my blog. Of course there are only 4.5 million in Norway, it’s probably harder in Normandy.
Crown: I like to fit new information into my mental 3D-models. You had placed yourself in a model I already had, so that post of yours had me going. I spotted you within a kilometer or so, so not nearly as exactly as you think. The rest was jocular exaggeration that, if I interpret your later hints correctly, happened to be accurate.
With our current host, I didn’t catch an interest for his house until I started building a mental image of the village to try and understand its name. I didn’t think of it then but my sudden interest in guessing the time of day in a photo obviously served the purpose of clearing up loose ends in my model.
I have that need to get the geography right also when I read novels where the a real city or landscape plays an important role. My father had some twenty or thirty of Simenon’s Maigret novels that I read in a rave one summer, and I soon found out that the real protagonist of those books is the city of Paris, and I got myself a streetmap.
That Maigret rave served me well the first time I was in Paris, a week with my university class at the start of the final year. I had the city modeled in my head (without streetnames, unfortunately, I’m notoriously bad with those) and could guide or find my way everywhere even when thoroughly encognacicated.
When I met my wife, just as I finished university, she lived in her parents’ basement. I started reading a Maigret novel that I found in a bookshelf. My later-to-be-wife-to-be had many qualities but no Paris streetmap, and was slightly amused by my request, but she thought her father might have since he also was “a type who reads map for fun”. She came down after having a Freudian Moment when her father answered: “Yeah, I have one I use when I read Maigret”.
encogn……..what ? Do I take it to mean the worse for drink ?
Sorry, incognacicated, I mean. That would have made it so much clearer. But you got it.
Canehan, earlier Kenehan (the given in Wikipedia):
I doubt very much that the name comes from the biblical “Cana’an” (perhaps a new spelling? in my youth it was written “Chanaan”). The Old Testament was not widely read until the Renaissance, indeed the Church forbade translations from the Vulgate (at least one early translator were burned at the stake for his pains), so apart from a few well-known biblical stories such as Adam and Eve or Noah’s Ark, there was no general knowledge of the Bible outside of the New Testament. Why should Norse settlers have named the village after a biblical name, when everywhere in the region places are monstly named after their original Norse owners, and religious names are those of saints? and the -han at the end seems to be transparently related to other words in -ham along the coast.
There has been a fair amount of scholarly study of Norse place-names in France. My father knew the most famous of those scholars, Jean Adigard des Gautries, who retired in a village not far from our town. There should be copies of his works (and similar resources) in public libraries in Dieppe or Rouen. (Even if Canehan is not mentioned, the works would give a good sense of how those Norse place-names were formed).
Trond, you wife: is she French? Or was the basement in Norway?
Marie-Lucie: Thanks, I hoped you would take the cue. I should have noticed the lacking palatalization. Wikipedia on de Gautries:
Crown: Norwegian wife, Norwegian basement, Norwegian translation of Maigret.
Marie-Lucie, Trond: Thanks, I’ll look them up. I never thought the Caan’an idea was likely anyway.
Trond, thank you for the reference. The scholar’s last name is Adigard des Gautries. According to my father, people were always misunderstanding his name (since Adigard sounds like perhaps an aristocratic medieval first name), calling him “Monsieur Adigard” or “Monsieur des Gautries”, and he kept having to correct them. I always heard my father refer to him correctly as “Monsieur Adigard des Gautries”.
I am not sure what you mean by “the lack of palatalization”: do you mean the initial k sound in Canehan? the Norman dialect does not palatalize Latin c (eg un cat, not un chat), let alone the Norse equivalent which came much later.
Marie-Louise:
The scholar’s last name is Adigard des Gautries. According to my father, people were always misunderstanding his name (since Adigard sounds like perhaps an aristocratic medieval first name), calling him “Monsieur Adigard” or “Monsieur des Gautries”, and he kept having to correct them.
And because of the likes of me, now you have too do what your father did. (Yes, that’s exactly what it sounded like to me.)
I am not sure what you mean by “the lack of palatalization”: do you mean the initial k sound in Canehan? the Norman dialect does not palatalize Latin c (eg un cat, not un chat), let alone the Norse equivalent which came much later.
You’re right, I meant the development of the k sound. I know some call that palatalization, even if it’s rather sibillization of an already palatal sound, but I’ll take a better term any day. My entire knowledge of linguistics consists of bits and pieces picked up from those I can trick into talking to me. Consider yourself tricked!
I even thought I knew that Norman French had preserved the initial k sound, and was close to asking if Canaan couldn’t have had a different pronunciation locally, but then I wisely decided that you know best.
I’ve done some searching. Quite a bit of work with toponyms seems to be going on at the Université de Caen, led by professor Jean Renaud. Another name is René Lepelley, the author of Dictionnaire étymologique des noms de communes de Normandie. Also a few theses by professor Renaud’s students are online, but I’d expect most or all to be incorporated into Lepelley’s book.
Marie-Lucie: My sincerest apologies. I was all too conscious not to misspell your name!
Trond: Thanks for the Lepelley reference. My local maison de la presse will probably have it, or can certainly get it for me. I’ll report later.
Trond, thank you, now I don’t have to call you Trend.
Canaan/Chanaan: both would start with a k sound. But Old Testament reading has never been popular in Catholic countries, even after the prohibition was lifted, so not that many people would even be familiar with the name unless they were from practicing Protestant families, which in Normandy would hardly be found in rural areas.
Renaud, Lepelley: Monsieur Adigard des Gautries is no longer with us, but it looks like there are quite a few people continuing his work. If my father does not already have the book I might get it for him for Christmas.