There’s a ton of these tautonyms across the world.
Sahara, Gobi and Kalahari are also just Arabic, Mongolian and kgalagadi for desert, Michigan (as in the lake, not the state, which is named after the lake) is big lake in Ojibwe, Torpenhow is little town next to a hill, whose name is the old English, Celtic and old Norse for hill. So if you refer to the Torpenhow hill, you’re basically calling it the hill hill hill hill.
Torpenhow Hill, love it.
Ah, the universality of man('s miscommunications)
If you never travelled more than 20 miles from your home in your life, and there’s only a single desert in that region, there’s no point in giving it a name. Everyone will just call it “the desert”. The need to give unique names to (large) geographic features only arrise with, and for, explorers. The people they were talking too probably didn’t even consider the idea of a large geographic feature like the desert or the big lake having or needing a proper name.
Explanation: The exact etymology of Africa is still hotly debated, but it’s fairly certain that it’s not actually what the inhabitants of North Africa primarily called their land. As with many cases in history, translation is a bitch - ‘Avon’ is a common component of rivers in Britain, for example, because when the Romans came in and asked the locals what the local river was called, they told the Mediterranean weirdos that it was an ‘Avon’ - a fuckin’ river. XD
Same energy:
Ca-NA-da!
