English Toponyms
Yesterday I pondered the nation Turkey, and wondered why it had to be so hilariously homophonous with the Thanksgiving bird. I reasoned that there is another English toponym -ia that is also available, so *Turkia is a reasonable name for the country that avoids any such problems.
But Turkia seemed anomalous to me. To try to figure out why, I rummaged through my mental list of toponyms to examine the distribution of -y vs. -ia in place names.
| -y | -ia |
|---|---|
| Hungary Germany Italy Saxony duchy county vichy |
Pennsylvania Bulgaria Romania Croatia Bavaria Wallachia Bohemia |
Obviously this is a pretty short list, but I observed the following: Toponyms with Germanic-style initial stress take the ending -y. Conversely, all of the toponyms ending in -ia have Latinate antepenult stress. This appears to hold even when the root to which the toponym is applied is monosyllabic, in which case the resulting toponym can only end in -y.
There are some exceptions (e.g. Parthia), but they tend to be learned words that seem to be internalized as foreign terms, and so not subject to normal English morphemic rules. For toponyms that have been completely nativized, it seems to hold that -y and -ia are allomorphs whose realization depends on the stress pattern of the word.
This in turn explains why Turkey is Turkey and not Turkia: since the stem is monosyllabic, only the -y pattern can apply. The spelling “-ey” appears to be a fluke, perhaps influenced by the unfortunate homophony that got me thinking about this in the first place.