[Calpernia]

You know what? I think you nailed it there. The chatter wasn't speaking of Tappahannock per say. It is a metaphor. What ever they were referring to, Tappahannock was used as a reference to rise and fall of water.

I still think this is how rural was misinterpreted too. This is just my opinion based solely on what I've been learning from the Arabic language.

[TomInNJ]

"You know what? I think you nailed it there. The chatter wasn't speaking of Tappahannock per say. It is a metaphor. What ever they were referring to, Tappahannock was used as a reference to rise and fall of water."

"I still think this is how rural was misinterpreted too. This is just my opinion based solely on what I've been learning from the Arabic language."

I think there was a misunderstanding of the phonetics (phonemes) during "translation." I put translation in quotation because I understood in an earlier post that there was an attempt to translate certain sequence of phonemes. That "translation" came very close to the sounding of Tappahannock. You don't translate phonemes, you translate words (or sequences of sounds/phonemes).

I may be wrong, but my explanation of how they came up with the "Tappahannock" phonetic is very plausible.