The study of the early forms of present place names may indicate the culture which gave the name together with the characteristics of the site. In the UK, for example, ey meaning a dry point and ley meaning a forest, wood, glade, or clearing appear in many place names such as Chelsea and Henley-in-Arden.

Place names label, define, and represent places and people; ‘a place name sometimes fills up its territory with sense of place and homogenizes it. Fixing a boundary on a map reinforces a real differentiation and might segregate the dwellers’ (Okamoto (2000) PHG 24, 328). In the Hawaiian Islands, place names change ‘from being reflections of Hawaiian geographic discourse, to being encoded within Western approaches to knowledge, commodification of the environment, and control of territory’ (Hermann (1999) AAAG 89, 1). Place names mark the spatiality of power relationships (Myers (1998) Tijdschrift 87, 3); see also Usher (2003) Canad. Geogr./Géog. canad. 47, 4 on aboriginal land claims in Canada. Kearns and Berg (2002) Soc. & Cult. Geog. 3, 3 consider pronunciation to be an important element of the cultural politics of place naming within post-colonial societies.

It is common for revolutionary regimes to create new state symbols to ‘remove evidence of the deposed regime and to establish an identity for the usurper’. During the Soviet period a special framework of laws and instructions was created to regulate a renaming policy. With the fall of the Soviet Union, renaming began in earnest; in Armenia, for example. By 1988 some 598 out of 980 place names in the Armenian SSR had been renamed.

http://monderusse.revues.org/135 Arseny Saparov on the alteration of place names in Soviet Armenia.