Dragaeran Etymology

In Steven Brust's series of fantasy novels set in (on?) Dragaera, he occasionally has a bit of fun with his fictional and not-so-fictional languages. For example, the language of humans, pardon me, Easterners is real-world Hungarian. In The Phoenix Guards, he describes the origin of the name of a Dragaeran city, Bengloarafurd.

From pp. 249-250 of the paperback edition:

What followed was ten years of almost constant war between the Dragonlords of the Empire and the Easterners, during which the Easterners occupied the area and fought from the surrounding mountains. The Serioli, who departed the area to avoid any of the unfortunate incidents that war can produce, left only their name for the place, which was "Ben," meaning "ford" in their language. The Easterners called the place "Ben Ford," or, in the Eastern tongue, "Ben gazlo."

After ten years of fierce battle, the Imperial Army won a great victory on the spot, driving the Easterners well back into the mountains. The Dragonlords who had found the place, then, began calling it "Bengazlo Ford." The Dragons, wishing to waste as little time on speech as possible, shortened this to Benglo Ford, or in the tongue of the Dragon, which was still in use at the time, "Benglo ara." Eventually, over the course of the millenia, the tongue of the Dragon fell out of use, and the Northwestern language gained preeminence, which rendered the location Bengloara Ford, which was eventually shortened to Bengloarafurd. The river crossing became the Bengloarafurd Ford, which name it held until after the Interregnum when the river was dredged and the Bengloarafurd Bridge was built. Should anyone be interested in finding this delightful city, it still stands, but the city was renamed Troe after the engineer who built the bridge, either because the citizens were proud of their new landmark, or because the engineer's name was short.

The only flaw in this is that the variations of "ford" in the name are clearly English morphemes, but I'm willing to cut Brust some slack on this point. In stories that are supposed to be translated from other languages (as this one is), it's hard to convey puns and wordplay, so he's simply chosen to represent the modern Dragaeran language using English. Tolkien did the same thing in The Lord of the Rings with Westron, the "Common Speech", and that's enough of a precedent for me.

[Now playing: "Go!" by Tones on Tail]