I thought back to my school days when a teacher would call roll alphabetically. Naturally people with surnames like Anderson would get the first call. Mine fell somewhere in the middle so I had to pay attention for a little while. Then I could daydream for the rest of the drill. However, I always felt sorry for people named Zimmerman or such who had to remain on their toes the entire time.
Those lucky Andersons, though. They could kick-back and relax, their jobs completed immediately thanks to a simple quirk of alphabetical order. I could probably say the same thing about countries. Imagine Afghanistan at the opening ceremony of the Olympics, first in line and grabbing a big dose of attention. Compare that to Zimbabwe. Most viewers probably tune out by the time Zimbabwe strolls along.
That got me wondering about which city, town, or village might grab the very first spot in an alphabetical line. Sure, it would vary based upon the language used to sort through the list. Even so, I didn’t let that spoil any of my fun.
Research appeared to be amazingly deficient though. I figured I’d find a ready list somewhere on the Intertubes and it would be easy. Perhaps that existed somewhere but I couldn’t find it. That meant I searched for a maximum of about 30 seconds. I did uncover the next best thing, Wikipedia’s List of towns and cities with 100,000 or more inhabitants.
A Coruña, Spain
A Coruña in Spain rose to the very top of that list (map). That was its officially-recognized name in the Galician language. This spelling predominated in the northwestern corner of Spain that was once part of the Kingdom of Galicia. In Spanish it was La Coruña and in English sometimes just Corunna.
According to the rules of alphabetization, nothing came before something. So the single letter A followed by a space came before A followed by additional letters. Thus Wikipedia placed it first because no other city started with the single letter A.
I had a bit of a quibble with A Coruña. The letter A was used as a definite article. Many grammarians claim that one should disregard a definite article in an alphabetical list. That happened regularly with geographic place names, e.g., The Bahamas becomes “Bahamas, The” and The Gambia transforms into “Gambia, The“. I’m sure there are plenty of learned people who debate these finer points back-and-forth. Not me. Anyway, placing A Coruña at the front of the line felt like cheating.
Aachen, Germany
Aachen seemed to align more properly with the spirit of the contest. It began with a double-A followed immediately by another letter near the start of the alphabet in the third position. AAC would be a hard combination to beat.
People have lived in the Aachen area (map) since neolithic times, drawn there by its warm spring-fed waters. It became a spa town during Roman times and then a favored place of kings such as Charlemagne. Modern aficionados of geo-oddities also appreciated Aachen for its placement on the German side of the Belgium – Netherlands – Germany (BEDENL) tripoint, and prior to that as part of the quadripoint with the bizarre Neutral Moresnet “no man’s land” condominium.
Aaron, USA
That still left a lot of white space between cities of a hundred thousand residents or more and the untold multitude of places with smaller populations. The lack of prior research continued to hamper my efforts. So I turned to the US Geological Survey’s Geographic Names Information System. It included a bunch of AAA stuff, primarily several small reservoirs called tanks in New Mexico, which I discounted. It also included an Aaberg School in South Dakota and the Aaberlite Mines in Colorado. Still, I couldn’t find a populated place that would come before Aachen in an alphabetical list.
I didn’t feel like running a bunch of separate queries but that’s what I faced. Unfortunately, GNIS required a minimum of three letters when using a wildcard. So I would have to search aaa*, aab*, aac* and so on if I wanted to check every combination starting with double-a). I took the easy route and figured a populated place named Aaron existed somewhere.
Sure enough, Aaron existed in four states, Georgia, Indiana, Kentucky and Missouri. None of them was larger than a flyspeck. Only Aaron, Indiana had a Wikipedia entry and even that contained only two simple sentences (“Aaron is an unincorporated community in Switzerland County, Indiana, in the United States. A post office was established at Aaron in 1871, and remained in operation until it was discontinued in 1907“).
That was a long way of saying I was too lazy to figure out a location that would appear first on a list of populated places in the United States. I’ll throw Aaron out there as my guess and let someone else challenge it if so inclined.
Aasiwaskwasich, Québec, Canada
Natural Resources Canada actually provided an alphabetic list of place names, bless their hearts. I suppose that was feasible because there were fewer places named in Canada due to large swaths of lightly-populated territory. Canada included a former First Nation Village named Aa-at-sow-is in British Columbia. That would be a top contender, however I wanted to find an inhabited place, not something abandoned. The best I could find was Aasiwaskwasich, completely in the middle of nowhere near the eastern side of Hudson Bay.
But wait, the next entry was amusing even if it wasn’t a populated locality: Aass Indian Reserve 3 (map) in the Nootka Land District, Vancouver Island, British Columbia. Interestingly, there were no signs of Aass Indian Reserves 1 or 2. Nor did there appear to be a tribe of Aass Indians. Don’t check a search engine for Aass Indians, though. I did and let’s just say one cannot unsee things once revealed.
Completely Unrelated
Twelve Mile Circle received its first visit ever from Wallis and Futuna yesterday! I thought it would be nearly impossible and it genuinely surprised me when it appeared. It’s a French collectivity in the South Pacific with only about 15,000 residents. Most of them speak Polynesian languages or French. I’m also not sure why they wanted to know more about Smokey and the Bandit’s Route. Even so, I will note that this page attracts a fairly steady stream of visitors for some unknown reason.
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