Reading Nabokov, there “…with the dash of the Danube in his veins…”. Turns out, Danube is Дунай. But that’s okay, trivial stuff, the interesting thing is something else. That Don, Danube, Dniester, Dnieper, Donets, Dvina, and Disna essentially mean more or less the same thing – river. Apparently, the ancient people were not always rich in imagination when it came to toponymy. If you live by the water, you simply call it “River”. Over time, others came, heard this word, took it as a proper name, and altered it slightly to fit their accent. This way “River” (Danu) transformed into a dozen different names across the map of Europe.
The river Volga essentially is also just “river”. Okay, slightly different, “Volga” comes from the Proto-Slavic *Vòlga, which literally means “moisture” or “water”.
Also, it turned out that the Sahara desert is named so because Sahara (الصحراء) is desert. And the Gobi desert is called Gobi because Gobi in Mongolian is desert.
While googling, I stumbled upon another fun thing. There’s a place in England, Torpenhow Hill. The name is composed of four different linguistic layers: Tor — in Old English “hill”, Pen — in Cumbric “hill”, How — in Old Norse “hill”, Hill — in modern English “hill”. Result: “Hill-hill-hill-hill”. Likely, each new people arriving in this area didn’t understand that Tor, Pen, and How were already names for the hill, and added their variant of the word “hill”.
Hi, I'm Rauf Aliev. 