Month: June 2020

BabyNames.com makes a powerful statement in honor of the black lives lost to police violence

Jennifer Moss, longtime member of the American Name Society and owner of BabyNames.com, has chosen a unique and powerful way to show solidarity with the black community and support for Black Lives Matter.

Instead of the usual popular name rankings and photos of babies, the site’s homepage shows a black box with dozens of names, all belonging to black Americans who’ve died due to police violence or, in a few cases, at the hands of civilians.

“Each of these names was somebody’s baby,” the site reads. A reminder of the importance of names.

Trends in Onomastic Research in Brazil

An article with this title has just been published at the Swiss “Linguistik Online” (2020) by Márcia Sipavicius Seide and Marcelo Saparas.

 

Abstract
This article brings together recent onomastic investigations developed in Brazil between 2011 and 2018. In the field of toponomastics there is some degree of uniformity resulting from both the use of the same research paradigm and the development of projects dedicated to the production of toponymic atlases in several regions of the country. In the field of anthroponomastics, however, there is dispersion and fragmentation of anthroponymic studies due to non-affiliation with the field by some sociolinguistics and literature researchers The comparison between research papers in this review and a number of onomastic studies in Europe reveals that the socio-onomastic field is an emerging one in both Brazil and Europe. There are investigations that relate the studies of linguistic settings to toponymic studies and socio-anthroponomastic investigations based on data collection in written documents or data generation through field investigations. The existence of comparative anthroponomastic research and studies dealing with theory, methodology and literature review in the field of anthroponomastics can be observed. Studies about Brazilian indigenous onomastics and secondary non-official personal names used by Brazilian city councilors has been found just in Brazil in the literature review presented in this paper.

War of Names: “Floyd Road” in China vs. “Li Wenliang Plaza” in the US

Chinese netizens on May 31, 2020 protested against the US’ continued hyping of doctor Li Wenliang’s death to attack China, saying the US should find fault with itself and reflect on George Floyd’s death rather than point its fingers at others. Some Net users suggested renaming the road near the US Embassy in Beijing as Floyd Road in commemoration of the victim of US racism and police violence.

Fu Xuejie, the wife of late doctor Li Wenliang, has voiced her opposition to a US lawmaker’s push that calls for the street in front of the Chinese Embassy in the US to be renamed Li Wenliang Plaza, saying she was “very sad to hear that.”