2846: Danube is just generic for water Oct 5, 2024

Across the world, especially where there have been varied people groups living in the same place land one after another, there will be tautological place names, where each element in the name ends up being the same thing, like the famous River Avon meaning “river river”, and it is a similar story with the River Danube. While today we are used to it simply as the name for a major European river, it comes from a very common root found around many Indo-European languages meaning ‘river’ from the original sense of ‘running’.