• hope@lemmy.world
    5·
    6 months ago

    Can confirm, definitely thought the two words were connected growing up there.

  • Kittywumpus@lemmy.world
    5·
    6 months ago

    Fun fact - Pennsylvania is named that because it was owned by some white guy (Penn) who owned a literal state sized chunk of woods (Sylvan-ia)

    • aname
      1·
      6 months ago

      Does the name have anything to do with transilvania?

      • Kittywumpus@lemmy.world
        1·
        6 months ago

        I’m no etymologist and that’s like a factoid I know, but Sylvan/silvan means woods I believe?

        Could be related 🤷‍♂️

        • aname
          2·
          6 months ago

          From Wikipedia:

          The earliest known reference to Transylvania appears in a Medieval Latin document of the Kingdom of Hungary in 1078 as ultra silvam, meaning “beyond the forest” (ultra meaning “beyond” or “on the far side of” and the accusative case of Sylva (sylvam) “woods, forest”). Transylvania, with an alternative Latin prepositional prefix, means “on the other side of the woods”. The Medieval Latin form Ultrasylvania, later Transylvania, was a direct translation from the Hungarian form Erdő-elve, later Erdély, from which also the Romanian name, Ardeal, comes. That also was used as an alternative name in German überwald (“beyond the forest”) (13th–14th centuries) and Ukrainian Залісся (Zalissia).

          So it seems to be

  • imPastaSyndrome@lemm.ee
    2·
    6 months ago

    Sure, on the East with Spooky by lake spooky.

    And uhhh… A bunch of places named like They were named by a 13-year-old boy too…

    • Zink@programming.dev
      2·
      6 months ago

      It really is funny. Gobbler’s Knob is fun to visit, but much smaller than you’d expect. There’s Intercourse, Climax, and Beaver. Or if you want to get away from it all you could go to Moon or Mars.