Bryn Mawr Rehab Hospital
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That's the name of a very fine health care facility nestled in the wooded hills of Philadelphia's northwestern suburbs — Malvern, Tradyffrin, Bryn Mawr ("large hill"), Bala Cynwyd (named for towns in Wales), Haverford, Narberth, Radnor, Berwyn, Merion, and Gwynedd.
My inclination is to abbreviate the name somehow — BMRH, Bryn Mawr RH, etc. — but the people who work at Bryn Mawr Rehab Hospital tend not to do that. They want to keep the word "rehab" in their habitual reference.
On the other hand, I think "rehab" is too casual and informal for an institution of such complexity and excellence. By nature, "rehabilitation" is hexasyllabically cumbersome and "hospital" is trisyllabically unglamorous.
Never mind what Bryn Mawr Rehabilitation Hospital is called on a day-to-day basis, it's a thoroughly admirable place.
Praiseworthy people from all over the world work here: Europe, South Asia, Southeast Asia, dozens of states in the union, Casablanca…. One who caught my attention today is named "Endrita", Albanian for "light". That immediately reminded me of my dear, late friend, Eric Hamp (1920-2019) and the importance of Albanian for Indo-European, which he studied so intensively for decades.
Selected readings
- "The origins and affinities of Tocharian" (8/20/23)
- "Eric Pratt Hamp (11/16/1920 – 2/17/2019)
- Eric P. Hamp, with annotations and comments by Douglas Q. Adams. "The Expansion of the Indo-European Languages: An Indo-Europeanist’s Evolving View". Sino-Platonic Papers, 239 (August, 2013), 1-14.
- Hamp, E. P. (1998). “Whose were the Tocharians?: Linguistic subgrouping and diagnostic idiosyncrasy,” in The Bronze Age and Early Iron Age Peoples of Eastern Central Asia, ed. V. H. Mair, 1: 307–346. Washington and Philadelphia: Institute for the Study of Man and the University of Pennsylvania Museum.
Martin Schwartz said,
April 4, 2026 @ 3:12 pm
Actually, all those palce names are of Welsh origin, except maybe Merion; there is however a Portmeirion in Gwynedd, N. Wales.
My uncle Harry was born in Merthyr Tydfil, S. Wales. There is a
Cyfarthfa Castle there, I see. Endrita is probably the source
(or dialectal variant?) of Drita D'Avanzo (née Selmani)
of Mob Wives; her parents were Albanians.
Hamp, of blessed memory, honored me in at least 2 of his famously brief articles by praising etymologies I had sent him and building on them, but he never sent me what he had written on these.
He was commemorated as part of a series of 3 .Albanian postage stamps. Shortly before his death I wrote this limerick:
PHILOLOGICAL PHILATELY LATELY
An American linguist named Hamp
is on an Albanian stamp.
So cool and so hip
in the language called Shqip, f
Albanian linguists he's champ.
The near centenarian Hamp
can see his face on the stamp;
unlike that of Jokl,
his mustache looks local,
it's long, doesn't droop, nor looks damp.
H. Pedersen's last in the series,
tho his studies still leave certain queries:
How'd gj come from *s?
Assess and then guess;
yes, Jokl and Hamp had their theories.
I didn't intend to demean Norbert Jokl, a truly great scholar
who was long harassed and finally killed by the Nazis.
Martin Schwartz
featuring illustrious Albanologists
Martin Schwartz said,
April 4, 2026 @ 3:14 pm
Actually, all those palce names are of Welsh origin, except maybe Merion; there is however a Portmeirion in Gwynedd, N. Wales.
My uncle Harry was born in Merthyr Tydfil, S. Wales. There is a
Cyfarthfa Castle there, I see. Endrita is probably the source
(or dialectal variant?) of Drita D'Avanzo (née Selmani)
of Mob Wives; her parents were Albanians.
Hamp, of blessed memory, honored me in at least 2 of his famously brief articles by praising etymologies I had sent him and building on them, but he never sent me what he had written on these.
He was commemorated as part of a series of 3 .Albanian postage stamps. Shortly before his death I wrote this limerick:
PHILOLOGICAL PHILATELY LATELY
An American linguist named Hamp
is on an Albanian stamp.
So cool and so hip
in the language called Shqip, f
Albanian linguists he's champ.
The near centenarian Hamp
can see his face on the stamp;
unlike that of Jokl,
his mustache looks local,
it's long, doesn't droop, nor looks damp.
H. Pedersen's last in the series,
tho his studies still leave certain queries:
How'd gj come from *s?
Assess and then guess;
yes, Jokl and Hamp had their theories.
I didn't intend to demean the second Albanologist, a truly great scholar
who was long harassed and finally killed by the Nazis.
Martin Schwartz
featuring illustrious Albanologists
Martin Schwartz said,
April 4, 2026 @ 3:21 pm
Sorry for the typos. f =for, but on the next line.
I couldn't repeat the 2nd scholar, Norbert J.'s, name,
because LL's robot disallowed what it thought was a repetition.
MS
Xtifr said,
April 4, 2026 @ 5:44 pm
I think it;s probably a good thing that rehab(ilitation) is becoming a common enough concept that people are seeking a shorter name! Sesquipedalianism can have its charms, but I think that the full-length version of "rehab" may be crossing the line from formal into stodgy. If, indeed, it has not already crossed that line! Amy Winehouse's hit song "Rehab" was two decades ago! (Ouch!)
J.W. Brewer said,
April 4, 2026 @ 9:13 pm
I know you weren't trying to provide an exhaustive/complete catalog of Philadelphia-region Welsh-origin toponyms, but one should not overlook in that regard the resonant name of Chester County's Uwchlan Township, plus its neighbor Upper Uwchlan Twp. Also East Nantmeal and West Nantmeal Townships, whose Old-Country namesake (in Radnorshire) is currently spelled Nantmel.
Tom said,
April 5, 2026 @ 1:27 am
In Japan, it's "rihabiri".
My sense from working in health care is that most doctors, nurses, therapists, etc don't really regard "rehab" as a shortened form of "rehabilitation". Obviously, it is, and if you asked directly, you would probably get an affirmative answer. However, if you used the long form as in, "when does my rehabilitation start?" you might find HCWs having to pause to process what you mean. Similarly, phrases such as "cath lab" or "o-b-g-y-n" are so ubiquitious and consistent that no one regards them as casual.or informal abbreviations. Rather, they are more like medical jargon. In fact, in the middle of an emergency, if a doctor called out "start cardiopulmonary resuscitation", she might be reprimanded later because the oddness of the phrase raises a risk of misunderstanding and error.
jin defang said,
April 5, 2026 @ 7:32 am
let's have more on how the Welsh arrived in this particular area of Pennsylvania—-did they arrived speaking Welsh, and have their been any efforts to retain the language? As indeed there are in Wales.
Kate Bunting said,
April 5, 2026 @ 9:04 am
I gather that the local pronunciation of 'Mawr' is 'mar', not preserving the Welsh 'oo' sound for 'w'. (I'm not Welsh, but went to university in Aberystwyth).
Robert Coren said,
April 5, 2026 @ 9:44 am
Several of those place names ring chimes for me: My brother has lived in Philadelphia for more than 50 years (since getting a teaching job at Penn, which he left a long time ago), but his first year in the region he lived in Bala Cynwyd; my parents spent their last years at a retirement community in Haverford, and both of them spent time at Bryn Mawr Hospital (not rehab).
VVOV said,
April 5, 2026 @ 10:16 am
Arguably the most reknowned rehab hospital in the US was the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago (RIC, and referred to as such by its workers/patients).
In 2017, they built a glittering new building and the hospital was renamed the "Shirley Ryan AbilityLab" after the donor who, presumably, funded the bulk of the new construction. Understandably, many people were confused by this curious marketing decision to delete the straightforward key words "rehabilitation" and "hospital"…
The new acronym SRAL for this facility is sometimes pronounced [ʃɹæɫ] by its staff, which is mildly linguistically interesting.
There's also a "Bryn Mawr" street and neighborhood in Chicago, about 7 miles north of SRAL along the lakefront.
J.W. Brewer said,
April 5, 2026 @ 2:21 pm
To jin defang's question, despite the ambitions of some of the early settlers in the 1680's of the so-called "Welsh Tract" west of Philadelphia to create a stable and permanent Brythonic-speaking enclave, language shift nonetheless occurred as it is wont to do and the area was predominantly Anglophone by 1730 or 1740 although it took several generations after that before there were no Welsh-speakers left. One hindrance to revival efforts is that once language shift had happened an identifiable ethnic community soon enough vanished via assimilation into the larger English-ancestry local Quaker population, since there was no longer anything sufficiently motivating endogamy. So a lot of folks (of the smallish percentage of the current regional population primarily descended from the early British settlers) have a little Welsh ancestry but almost none have a family tree dominated by that ancestry. German persisted much longer in Pennsylvania because the early German-speaking communities were larger in proportion to their Anglophone neighbors and there was less intermarriage.
It's parallel to the way in which, for example, I myself have a little bit (low single digits on a percentage basis) of ancestry from the early French-speaking Huguenot settlers of parts of the Hudson Valley, as do lots of other folks of predominantly "WASP" ancestry, but very few people are predominantly of 17th-century Huguenot-settler ancestry because of lack of endogamy following language shift.
A bit further west in Pa., by the way, you can find further Welsh toponyms like Caernarvon and Brecknock, the latter of which is the "English" spelling of Brycheiniog.
KeithB said,
April 6, 2026 @ 7:24 am
There is the Rancho Los Amigos National Rehabilitation Center in Downey, CA, but I have never heard an abbreviation, they just call it "Rancho Los Amigos" for short.
https://dhs.lacounty.gov/rancho/rancho-los-amigos-learn-more/
Peter Cyrus said,
April 7, 2026 @ 12:53 am
So we start with a somewhat long and infrequent word with a slightly obscure meaning. Then a new concept arises, and we apply to it this older word, giving it new life. Because of the newly increased frequency, a shortened form is now recognized, and using the longer form becomes unnecessary. But the new short form is never applied to the original meaning.
Isn't that just the etymology of a new word?