Hehe. Never heard of that one. I want to know how aware these people are when they name things. In sports, a bit of humor is probably common, but with the neanderthals, I just don't see the high-strung scientists of the late 1800's intentionally making a joke on this kind of thing. I do however see them doubling down on a decision even if it's pointed out that it's stupid.
It's actually in England, although funnily enough the part of England it's in is called Cumbria, which has the same origin as the Welsh for Wales "Cymru". So it's sort of in Wales, just not the Wales that we call Wales in English.
Anyway it's Old English torr, Middle Welsh penn, and Danish hoh. And like many British place names the pronunciation is not what you would expect at all at first glance. It's "tra-pen-uh"
worst part for me as a swede is that it ends up being interpreted to mean "neander speaker", since "thal" becomse "tal" which means speech in swedish..
so not only is there the standard "neanderthals stupid and primitive" association, but also there's the added layer of implication that they spoke weird!
They did speak weird though! Analysis of their airways suggest that they had a much higher-pitched voice than our kind, and probably had a harder time with consonants. So their language would have certainly been different. Although we have no way of knowing if parts of their language still lives on in our speech today.
According to Wikipedia, the Neandertal (the valley) was named after 17th century priest and composer Joachim Neander. Where does the "new man" come in?
Right, so I seem to have gotten it wrong on his name. It was Neander (New Man in greek) rather than Neumann (New Man in german), but I should also have specified in the meme that the name means New Man.