Llanes
Principado de Asturias
From the Latin plana '(land) flat, plain', in substantivised plural and with Asturian palatalisation of the pl- group into ll-: 'the plains'. It describes the Asturian coastal shelf on which the town sits.
Evolution of the name
- planas late Latin 6th — 9th century
- Llanes medieval Asturleonese from the 12th century
Reflections, to the letter
Llanes comes from Latin plana, 'the flat lands', with the Asturian softening of pl- into ll- that Castilian never made. The name describes the rasa: the raised, near-level marine platform the town sits on and the path runs across. To look at the straight line dividing the cliffs from the meadow, that stone tabletop sheared off above the sea, is to see the flatland the name records.
Glossary
- Fuero
- A medieval legal privilege granted by a king to a town, conferring special rights and freedoms.
- Palatalisation
- Softening of a sound as its articulation shifts toward the palate.
- Palatalisation pl- > ll-
- A phonetic shift characteristic of Asturleonese and Galician by which the Latin initial clusters pl-, cl-, fl- palatalised into ll- (Asturian) or ch- (Galician). In Castilian the shift was partial or absent: an internal phonetic border of Spanish.
- Rasa costera
- A raised flat marine platform, formed by wave erosion on the coast during the Pleistocene. Characteristic of the eastern Asturian coast, it sustains agriculture in the coastal strip between the cliff and the range.
- Substantivised plural
- A device by which an adjective or noun in the plural is fixed as a place name without the noun that governed it: fontanas = "[lands of the] springs", ferreiros = "[place of the] smiths". Frequent in medieval repopulation.
Sources
- Cano González, A.M. — Diccionario Etimológico de la Toponimia Asturiana
- García Arias, X.L. — Toponimia asturiana: el porqué de los nombres
- Ayuntamiento de Llanes · sección de historia (llanes.es)
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Camino del Norte