a question of vocabulary

[ritaxis]

What's the difference between a cantonment and an encampment?

Comments

[kate-schaefer.livejournal.com]

I am not looking up the technical difference; probably someone else knows it off the bat and will tell you. My back of the head belief as a reader is that a cantonment is more permanent than an encampment. If I think about it more, my impressions of the words are infected by the Swiss political canton and the song "Tenting on the Old Campground," and at that point I am no longer a useful source of data.

[fivemack.livejournal.com]

Permanence, I think. 'Cantonment' feels almost distractingly Indian-subcontinent to me: the British built very permanent cantonments outside big Indian towns, which have ended up lending their names to quite major railway stations - so I've only ever seen 'cantonment' on the signs of stations that I've passed through on trains in India. Given where the British Empire was, the same thing happens in Pakistan.