Friday, December 28, 2012

Longest Place Name



Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch (57 letters) is a large village and community on the island of Anglesey in Wales, situated on the Menai Strait next to the Britannia Bridge and across the strait from Bangor. This village has the longest place name in Europe and one of the longest place names in the world. The short form of the village's name is Llanfairpwllgwyngyll, also spelled Llanfair Pwllgwyngyll. It is commonly known as Llanfair PG or Llanfairpwll.
According to the 2001 census, the population of the community is 3,040, 76% of whom speak Welsh fluently; the highest percentage of speakers is in the 10–14 age group, where 97.1% are able to speak Welsh.[citation needed] It is the fifth largest settlement on the island by population. 

Visitors stop at the railway station to be photographed next to the station sign, visit the nearby Visitors' Centre, or have 'passports' stamped at a local shop. Another tourist attraction is the nearby Marquess of Anglesey's Column, which at a height of 27 metres (89 ft) offers views over Anglesey and the Menai Strait. Designed by Thomas Harrison, the monument celebrates the heroism of Henry Paget, 1st Marquess of Anglesey at the Battle of Waterloo.
Name
The long form of the name is the longest officially recognised place name in the United Kingdom and one of the longest in the world, being 58 characters in length (51 letters since "ch" and "ll" are digraphs, or single letters, in the Welsh language).
The name means: [St.] Mary's Church (Llanfair) [in] the hollow (pwll) of the white hazel (gwyngyll) near (goger) the rapid whirlpool (y chwyrndrobwll) [and] the church of [St.] Tysilio (llantysilio) with a red cave ([a]g ogo goch).
This village was originally known as Llanfair Pwllgwyngyll (and is sometimes still referred to as Llanfairpwllgwyngyll) and was given its long name in the 19th century in an attempt to develop the village as a commercial and tourist centre (see Significance of the name below). Today the village is still signposted as Llanfairpwllgwyngyll, marked on Ordnance Survey maps as Llanfair Pwllgwyngyll and is known to locals as Llanfairpwll or simply Llanfair.
The name is also seen shortened to Llanfair PG, which is sufficient to distinguish it from the many other Welsh villages with Llanfair in their names. Other variant forms use the full name but with tysilio mutated to dysilio, and/or with a hyphen between drobwll and llan. In Welsh, the initial Ll may be mutated to a single L in some contexts. 



Taumata­whakatangihanga­koauau­o­tamatea­turi­pukakapiki­maunga­horo­nuku­pokai­whenua­kitanatahu (51 letters) is the Maori name for a hill, 305 metres (1,001 ft) high, close to Porangahau, south of Waipukurau in southern Hawke's Bay, New Zealand.
The name would be often shortened to Taumata by the locals for ease of conversation. The New Zealand Geographic Placenames Database, maintained by Land Information New Zealand (LINZ), records the name as "Taumata­whakatangihanga­koauau­o­tamatea­pokai­whenua­ki­tana­tahu".[1] It has gained a measure of fame as it is the longest place name found in any English-speaking country, and it is the second-longest place name in the world, according to Wises New Zealand Guide and reported in the New Zealand Herald.
Meaning
The name on the sign that marks the hill is "Taumata­whakatangihanga­koauau­o­tamatea­turi­pukakapiki­maunga­horo­nuku­pokai­whenua­kitanatahu", which translates roughly as "The summit where Tamatea, the man with the big knees, the climber of mountains, the land-swallower who travelled about, played his nose flute to his loved one". At 85 letters, it has been listed in the Guinness World Records as the longest place name in the entire world. 


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