My intention for this blog is to use it to post small GIS and geography projects that aren’t large enough to try to find more-formal venues for. However, it will probably also end up having some things that aren’t specifically GIS or geography related but that I think are likely also of interest to my readers.
Today, want to write up the results of an online research rabbit hole I went down this afternoon: trying to figure out why English and Dutch seem to be the only European languages where the word for a railroad doesn’t literally mean “iron road.”
When I moved to the Netherlands this summer, I noticed that unlike Spanish (“ferrocarril”), French (“chemin de fer”), and German (“Eisenbahn”), the Dutch word for a railroad, “spoorweg,” isn’t a compound of words for iron and road or path. Instead, it seems to come from two different words meaning something like path and track. However, until I looked into it this afternoon, I hadn’t realized that every other European language seems to use a word for railroads that means iron road, too: Dutch and English seem to be the only exceptions. Even Irish uses “bóthar iarainn” for railroads, though I’m not sure when the term originated.
Furthermore, a large share of the Wiktionary entries for European languages’ words for railroad explicitly say that they are calques of either “chemin de fer” or, more often, “Eisenbahn.” Which led me to the question of whether German or French came up with their word for railroad first, or if they came up with them independently.
“Eisenbahn”
Since “Eisenbahn” seemed to be the source of the words for railroad in more languages, it seemed like a logical first place to start, especially since Germany, along with Belgium, was home to the first railroads in Continental Europe. The German dictionary Duden claims that “Eisenbahn” dates from “around 1820”, but the first company with it in its name seems to be the “k.k. privilegierten Ersten Eisenbahn-Gesellschaft“, founded in the Austrian Empire in 1825.
The only German-language railway name older than that I found a name for was the “Rauendahler Schiebeweg” from 1787, and Schiebeweg seems to mean something like “pushway.” In any case, iron or iron-plated rails did not exist in 1787, and I haven’t found any information on when exactly the term “Eisenbahn” appeared, or whether it was inspired by the French term.
“Chemin de Fer”
It would make make sense if “chemin de fer” was the source a number of European languages’ use of terms meaning “iron road” for railroads, given that it was the elite language in much of Europe in the 19th Century.
The earliest source I could find for a French term for railroad was an 1814 report by Pierre Michel Moisson-Desroches, an engineer in the employ of the First French Empire, “Sur la possibilité d’abréger les distances en sillonnant l’empire de sept grandes voies ferrées.” As far as I can tell, “voies ferrées” means “iron-plated roads.”
In any case, the specific phrase “chemin de fer” was certainly in use within a decade, since the first railroad concession in France, granted in 1824, used “chemin de fer” in its name and the Belgian state railroad company was chartered in 1832 as “Chemins de fer de l’État belge.”
Why doesn’t Dutch call them iron roads?
I haven’t been able to figure out whether either of German or French borrowed their name for railroads from the other, or whether they came up with the terminology independently. Most parts of Europe didn’t start building railroads before the 1840’s, at which point it seems completely plausible that they would have imported terminology from French or German, which had been using “chemin de fer” and “Eisenbahn” since the 1820’s.
That English didn’t borrow its term for railroads from French or German makes sense: Britain is generally considered the birthplace of railroads, and wooden trackways for horse-pulled wagons had been called “wagonways” in English at least since the 1600’s and the term “railway” was in use at least by the time Parliament passed the Middleton Railway Act in 1757.
The only railroads built in countries where French, German, or English wasn’t the dominant language were built in the Netherlands and the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies in southern Italy. The latter was built under a 1836 royal decree that called it “la strada di ferro Napoli-Nocera,” which means an “iron road,” though the current Italian word is “ferrovia,” which Wiktionary claims is a calque of “Eisenbahn.”
The situation for Dutch is more complicated. The first railroad in the Low Countries was built by the Belgian state and had a French name. The Hollandsche IJzeren Spoorweg-Maatschappij, established 1837, was the first railroad company in the Netherlands, and the name has “iron” in it along with “spoorweg.” The other major railroad company called itself the Nederlandsche Rhijnspoorweg-Maatschappij, established in 1845. But I can’t figure out anything more clear before that for the etymology of “spoorweg,” or when it became standardized as the Dutch word for a railroad.