One of the questions posed to informants in the Linguistic Atlas of the Middle Rockies was what word they would use in reference to flat-topped hills. While we expected informants to respond with the Spanish word mesa and the French word butte, the range of responses we subsequently obtained was greater than we had initially anticipated, as the phenomena of complexity once again reared its head with respect to what seemed to be a straightforward Atlas question.

As illustrated, mesa(s) was the most common variant, followed by flattop(s), butte(s), plateau and table, before culminating in a longish list of hapax legomena. Several of these oncers are the names of flat-topped hills with which the informants had some familiarity, and a few of these contained words that themselves as high-ranking variants, namely, Flattop Butte, Grand Mesa, and Little Flat Top. Because mesa means 'table' in Spanish, the variant table might be a literal translation, or it may have been an English word applied independently because of its shape, in the same way that bench apparently has. The opaque nature of loanwords can lead to redundancies in language: while not attested in this collection, the Boulder, Colorado, street name Table Mesa serves as an example of such a redundancy, as might Flattop Butte here.

If you'd like a word search that includes many of these terms, click here.

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