Is there a name for place names or, in particular, for the suffixes commonly used with them, for example -ton, -ville, -shire, -by, -burg, -bury, -ford, -cester, -ham, et al? Are there any guidelines to how these are used and applied? Some seem pretty obvious to me. A -ford place is near a river crossing. A -burg place is near a mountain. But some seem unclear…

chmism

The only word I know of relevance here is toponym, one meaning of which is "a place-name".
As to the list of suffixes, I think you’d need to chase down individual meanings, unless there’s a list out there on the Internet already.
By the way, I think -burg just means "town", as in Johannesburg, "Johannes’ Town" - it’s related to the word borough. The Germanic suffix -berg is commonly applied to hills and mountains.
Of your others, most are "town" or "village" words, of varying linguistic origins.
-ton = town (English)
-ville = town (French)
-by = village (Norse)
-burg/-bury = fortress town (Germanic)
-cester = town, originally a Roman camp (Latin castra)
-ham = village, as in hamlet (French)
A shire is a district with some sort of local governor (Old English)

Toponym is also used to mean "a name given to a person or thing marking a place of origin". Denim, for instance, is a toponym by this usage, since the name derives from the French serge de Nîmes, indicating a type of serge originally manufactured in the town of Nîmes.
My favourite unexpected toponym (in this sense) is coach, named for the Hungarian town of Kocs, where various kind of horse-drawn carriage were manufactured.

Grant

PS (Added after a little thought.) The governor of the shire was the sheriff, originally the shire reeve.

There’s an unusual suffix for place names in Germany, especially in southern Germany, and I wonder if it exists in the UK.

The suffix "-ing" is found in many place names, such as Sindelfingen (location of a major Daimler-Chrysler works) and Dingolfing (home of BMW). Tübingen is another one.

What is unusual about the suffix is that it originally did not refer to a place or a geographic characteristic. -ing names always contain the name of a person. They referred to the community of people associated with this person. For example, "Flaurling" meant "the people of Florinus". Thus, the -ing names identified a group of people rather than the place where these people lived. Probably the name went with the people if they moved to another location.

Primarily the Bayuwaren and the Alemannen used these names, but it was still a practice during the Roman times. I have also read that there are names in Schleswig-Holstein ending in -ing.

Is there anything similar in the UK?

Ilka

[quote author=ilka link=board=what;num=1033069368;start=0#2 date=09/28/02 at 13:58:47]The suffix "-ing" is found in many place names,
Is there anything similar in the UK?

Yes, for example Sonning is located on the South coast near Worthing and Arundel.

Bryn

... and Reading, the Mallings in Kent and many more.

For British names at least, there is a simple but interesting list at

http://www.countrylovers.co.uk/places/placnams.htm

Extracted from http://www.sca.org/heraldry/laurel/names/engplnam.html:

The Old English ending ­ingas means "the descendants, followers or people of"
[... The] names [Hastings, Reading] mean "the people of Haesta" and "the people of Reada." In the case of Hastings, one sees the survival of the plural form, while Reading shows the more normal pattern in which the plural is lost. [...] Some compounds of ­ingas were formed with a topographical term instead of a personal name. In this case, the people took their name from a feature of the landscape around their settlement and this name then became the name of the settlement. Avening (Gloucestershire) derives its name from "people living by the river Avon" [...] and Epping (Essex) from "the upland people".

C.

-stead is another place name suffix, although Hemstead (a town in Texas) and bedstead are the only ones I can think of at the moment.

DJ

As a glance at a map will show, «-ing» and «stad» suffixes are not uncommon in Scandinavian toponyms….

Henri