Not around here. We named towns after terms from native tribes who were kicked out of the area.
Wisconsin, but it applies to a lot of the Midwest and Plains and... Kinda everywhere in the US.
How do you think we pronounce DeQuindre? Dee-kin-der. How about Livernois? Just add an e at the end and you'll figure it out. Too our credit we somehow pronounce Cadeiux correctly.
Fortier pronounced "Forty-er" as in "my fort is more fort-like(fort-y) than your fort".
I grew up near Calais, Barre, and Charlotte, and none of them are pronounced how you'd think.
Most names are essentially just landmarks of some sort.
Hamburg is derived from Hammer Burg, simply meaning hammer castle.
Part of Hamburg is Altona, which is lower German for all too near, because it's really close to Hamburg.
East of Hamburg is Lübeck, which is means "settlement of the lub", whoever the lub were.
Even farther east is Warnemünde, which is located at the mouth (Mund) of the river Warnow.
Said river is getting pretty wide a bit upstream, which gave the city of Rostock its name ("where the river gets wider").
East of that: Stralsund. It's the sound (the water kind) of Strela.
And so on and so on.
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Wait until you learn a second language and start learning town names in a new country. Here we have such amazing town names like “The Eyebrow” and “Camp”.
(I just chose the silliest ones I know, there are normal town names too)
I like this more than toponyms ending with -pol, -tsk, -nsk, -rsk, and to a lesser extent -iv. It sounds unique and original, not following a template, and somehow fantasy-books-like as it suggests what people probably did there.
On the other hand, Ukraine has it's own New York too, just like in OP, and it inspired a lot of memes.
A lot of place names in English speaking countries are just names of natural or man-made features, but the etymology isn't obvious. Like Portsmouth or Waterford are pretty understandable, but -don, -den, -ton (valley, hill, farm) are all just things.
The Eyebrow's pretty cool though. Japan's also got some good ones, like Thousand Leaves, Oak (just oak), or (loosely translated) Noodle Hill. They like numbers too, like Eight Door or Lake Twelve. There's even a Silent Hill, but it's not too silent these days with almost 700,000 people there.
That's Mr. Ramenfuji to you-- no melons no lemon!
The actual place is Morioka if you were curious.
We got dead cow, toast meat, nose, of the blacks, beautiful old lady, triangle, burnt car and drowned kids.
Ixonia, Wisconsin solved that problem by just drawing random letters from a hat until they came up with something pronounceable: Ixonia.
But I'm always amused by the street Oxford Place near my house. It's a street named after a university, named after a city, named after a shallow spot where cattle could cross the river.
Or Australia. If it isn't something from europe, or a indigenous name, it's something really imaginative, like Northern Territory, Western Australia, and South Australia
Americans didn't name these places. There were no Americans when these places were named
Place names in general in the Pacific Northwest. Alaska is from an Aleut phrase. Out of the 36 Oregon counties, 10 have roots in indigenous language or culture.
The Phoenicians founded a new city in North Africa and called it 'New City' (Qart Hadasht), we now call it Carthage. The Carthaginians founded a new city in Spain and called it 'New City' (Qart Hadasht). The Romans conquered both of these cities, and found that having cities with the same confusing so called the second one 'New New City' (Carthago Nova).
In Alaska there's a town called Chicken. They wanted to name it after the Ptarmigan that were abundant in the area, but couldn't agree on the correct spelling.
In Iowa, we have a Madrid, but its pronounced like MADrid. And a town named Nevada, but pronounced NeVAYda.
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There's a Brisbane in California, pronounced like "Briz-bain" (the Aussie pronunciation is more like "Briz-bn")
There's a small town in Missouri I visited named Versailles and its pronounced ver-sails.
Aggravates the shit out of me. I was reading about some famous person, and it said he's from Bayonne. And I thought, no shit, he's from Jersey?
No, not that Bayonne, and not that Jersey either.
Jesus fuck why couldn't people have made up new names, or just used more of the native names that already existed?
There's a Derry and Londonderry in New Hampshire right beside each other. Being from Northern Ireland, that is incredibly amusing to me.