Talk:River Teith

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Teith vs Forth

The article states:

Many contest that the Forth is a tributary of the Teith and that the name of the much larger river should prevail below the confluence of the two near Drip.

That's getting the naming the wrong way round. The Forth actually starts at Stirling. The Forth is actually named from the sea -- it derives from the Norse fjorð. (Remember that the Forth was traditionally navigable as far up as Stirling Bridge or even the confluence with the Teith, and the tidal limit is only a few miles short of Stirling.)

Upstream of the confluence with the Teith, the river is known traditionally as The Old Forth, and this name is far more recent than the name for the tidal lower reach (because you couldn't get away with calling it Forth until people eventually forgot that the word actually meant a navigable seaway). And then there's also the fact that the lower reaches would have been Scots-speaking far sooner than the Upper Carse, which has Gaelic placenames postdating the Viking influence on the Northumbrian Anglo-Saxon that eventually became Scots. The Gaelic name for the Forth was "an abhainn dubh" -- the black river being a particularly apt name for a river that emerges from a peat bog.... Whether that was the "Old Forth" or the full thing I don't know, but as both rivers ran through bogland, the whole thing would have been even blacker then than it is now.

The "who?" tag is dated 2011, and no accreditation has arisen since, so I'm deleting it. Prof Wrong (talk) 22:59, 9 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]

While I contest the bald assertion about the derivation of the name "Forth" - it is at the very least open to other interpretations - it was unhelpful to have the sentence in, so I do agree with the deletion. Careful attention should be given to the way names of rivers migrate along their course (whether up or downstream) and that there are many water courses which have different names at different stretches - so the implied proposition that one river should have one name is fundamentally flawed. Freuchie (talk) 19:44, 2 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]

The fact that at least a stretch of the Forth may have been known as the Black Burn (I translate) in Gaelic times helps in the deconstruction, but is not very interesting in that it fails to give us any idea what it may have been called before 850. One tributary is the Keltie - and this name may have applied all the way to the confluence... Freuchie (talk) 11:56, 25 March 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Etymology

Dwelly does not recognise the form "Theamhich". See also my comments on the Mentieth page. Freuchie (talk) 19:46, 2 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]