On Wed, 20 Nov 2013 17:58:27 -0500, Dennis Lee Bieber wrote: > On Tue, 19 Nov 2013 21:48:10 +1100, Chris Angelico <ros...@gmail.com> > declaimed the following: > >>Anyway, we Aussies know more about your geography than you know about >>ours, I reckon. Which of these is not a real place: Parramatta, >>Warrnambool, Cerinabbin, Mordialloc? No fair Googling them, see if you >>can call it. I've been to three of the above places, the other one came >>up in a fantasy name generator. >> >> > Parramatta reads like a accented "parameter" > > Cerinabbin and Mordialloc sound like names from the Welsh influenced > Arthurian mythos: cf: Ceredwyn, Mordred (or a new word for a core dump > caused by memory faults: morte-alloc, death in allocation)
Cerinabbin is the fake name, although there is a suburb Morrabbin in Melbourne (and Darebin as well, which is pronounced "Darra Bin" not "Dare Bin"). Many placenames in Australia are borrowed from the UK, or named after British Royalty or explorers. Melbourne itself was, for a short time, named "Batmania", after the explorer John Batman. Others are based on native Australian Aboriginal words or placenames, such as Wagga Wagga, Woolloomoloo (a real place with an imaginary university, notable for the famous Monty Python Philosopher's Sketch), Coolangatta, Kalgoorlie, Moe (pronounced "Mo-e", not "Mow"), Koo Wee Rup, Didjabringabeeralong, and our capital city, Canberra. Actually, Didjabringabeeralong is a town in the land of Fourecks (or XXXX for those who can't spell), invented by Terry Pratchett for the novel "The Lost Continent". But the others are real. For a serious look at Australian placenames named after Australian Aboriginal words, see wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Australian_place_names_of_Aboriginal_origin -- Steven -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
