2nd Call for Submissions: Names, Naming, Identity, and the Law

Professor I. M. Nick, Editor-in-Chief of NAMES and Immediate Past President of the American Name Society, has issued a call for book chapter proposals on the topic of Names, Naming, Identity, and the Law. This call is for chapter proposals that critically address one of the following two sub-areas:

SUB-AREA ONE: the relationship between names, naming, the law and one of the following areas of identity: gender identification, sexual orientation, ethno-racial classification, family status, political affiliation, socio-economic attainment, religious denomination; nationality and citizenship, etc.
SUB-AREA TWO: the analytical methods used by private industry and/or governmental agencies to covertly or overtly extrapolate information about name-bearers’ potential identity using onomastic data.

The focus of this publication is placed upon nations where English is used as either a national or official language. However, chapter proposals that draw comparisons with other geolinguistic areas are also welcome. Proposals may explore any type of name (e.g. personal names, place names, trade names, brand names, etc.). The intended readership for this publication is made up of university students in advanced courses (upper undergrad/grad) as well as researchers in the disciplines of linguistics, language policy, law, history, sociology, government and politics. Despite the interdisciplinary appeal of this publication, this volume is primarily intended for students and scholars in language/linguistics. Researchers are encouraged to contact Dr. Nick with any questions regarding the suitability of envisioned themes. (mavi.yaz@web.de)

Proposal Submission Deadline: January 5, 2020

The official call for papers may be downloaded here.

“Places and Names” at the American Writers Museum

Marine war veteran and National Book Award finalist ELLIOT ACKERMAN presents his new memoir PLACES AND NAMES on 17 July 2019 at the American Writers Museum (Chicago, IL). It is an astonishing reckoning with the nature of combat and the human cost of the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria. Books will be sold and signed at the program.

At once an intensely personal book about the terrible lure of combat and a brilliant meditation on the larger meaning of the past two decades of strife for America, the region and the world, PLACES AND NAMES bids fair to take its place among our greatest books about modern war.

Spanish and Indian place names of California: Their Meaning and Their Romance

This is a git repository of the source files for the book “Spanish and Indian place names of California: Their Meaning and Their Romance” by Nellie Van de Grift Sanchez. It is a Project Gutenberg book, now on Github. https://www.GITenberg.org/

Project Gutenberg is a project to collect and archive public domain texts and is the source of this book. Project Gutenberg (PG) is a volunteer effort to digitize and archive cultural works, to “encourage the creation and distribution of eBooks”. It was founded in 1971 by Michael S. Hart and is the oldest digital library. Most of the items in its collection are the full texts of public domain books. The project tries to make these as free as possible, in long-lasting, open formats that can be used on almost any computer. As of July 2012, Project Gutenberg claimed over 40,000 items in its collection.

The Surnames of Cornwall

The book, The Surnames of Cornwall (published in January 2019) , a gazetteer of family names in Cornwall, grew out of the Surnames of Cornwall Project. That aimed to study the surnames by looking at the historical evidence for their geographical distribution and at early spellings. The Surnames of Cornwall

gives the purported meanings for 760 of the surnames which were the most common or the most unique to Cornwall in past times.
includes spelling variants of the names.
describes the areas in which the names originated and where they were found in the 1800s.
notes some well-known bearers of some of the names.
includes an introduction setting out the context for the study of surnames.

Book Announcement: Onomastics Between Sacred and Profane, ed. by Oliviu Felecan, Vernon Press

Vernon Press announces publication of the volume Onomastics Between Sacred and Profane, edited by Oliviu Felecan, part of the Vernon Series in Language and Linguistics. A free sample of the book is available as a PDF download, containing the Table of Contents, the Foreword, the list of Contributors, the Preface and the Indexes.

Religiously, God is the creator of everything seen and unseen; thus, one can ascribe to Him the names of His creation as well, at least in their primordial form. In the mentality of ancient Semitic peoples, naming a place or a person meant determining the role or fate of the named entity, as names were considered to be mysteriously connected with the reality they designated. Subsequently, God gave people the freedom to name persons, objects, and places. However, people carried out this act (precisely) in relation to the divinity, either by remaining devoted to the sacred or by growing estranged from it, an attitude that generated profane names. The sacred/profane dichotomy occurs in all the branches of onomastics, such as anthroponymy, toponymy, and ergonymy. It is circumscribed to complex and interdisciplinary analysis which does not rely on language sciences exclusively, but also on theology, ethnology, sociology, psychology, philosophy, anthropology, geography, history and other connected fields, as well as culture in general.

Despite the contributors’ cultural diversity (29 researchers from 16 countries – England, Finland, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Japan, Jordan, Kenya, Nigeria, Poland, Romania, Russia, South Africa, Spain, U.S.A., and Zimbabwe – on four continents) and their adherence to different religions and faiths, the studies in Onomastics between Sacred and Profane share a common goal that consist of the analysis of names that reveal a person’s identity and behavior, or the existence, configuration and symbolic nature of a place or an object.

If you would like to order a copy through the publisher, you can get a 24% discount using coupon CFC7736DFEE at Vernon Press. You can also order this book on Amazon.

Book Announcement: The Political Life of Urban Streetscapes: Naming, Politics, and Place

The Political Life of Urban Streetscapes: Naming, Politics, and Place
Edited by Reuben Rose-Redwood, Derek Alderman, Maoz Azaryahu
2018 Routledge
334 pages | 18 B/W Illus.

Streetscapes are part of the taken-for-granted spaces of everyday urban life, yet they are also contested arenas in which struggles over identity, memory, and place shape the social production of urban space. This book examines the role that street naming has played in the political life of urban streetscapes in both historical and contemporary cities. The renaming of streets and remaking of urban commemorative landscapes have long been key strategies that different political regimes have employed to legitimize spatial assertions of sovereign authority, ideological hegemony, and symbolic power. Over the past few decades, a rich body of critical scholarship has explored the politics of urban toponymy, and the present collection brings together the works of geographers, anthropologists, historians, linguists, planners, and political scientists to examine the power of street naming as an urban place-making practice. Covering a wide range of case studies from cities in Europe, North America, Sub-Saharan Africa, and Asia, the contributions to this volume illustrate how the naming of streets has been instrumental to the reshaping of urban spatial imaginaries and the cultural politics of place.

ICONN4: Proceedings of the Fourth International Conference on Onomastics available online

The Proceedings of the Fourth International Conference on Onomastics “Name and Naming” has been published online, as a downloadable PDF. It was edited by Oliviu Felecan.

The general topic was Sacred and Profane in Onomastics. The content is divided into the following categories:

Sacred and Profane in Anthroponymy
Sacred and Profane in Toponymy
Sacred and Profane in Names in Public Space (e.g., commercial names etc.)
Sacred and Profane in Literary Onomastics

Book publication: Namen und Geschlechter/Names and Genders

Namen und Geschlechter: Studien zum onymischen Un/doing Gender [Names and Genders: Studies on the Onymic Doing and Undoing of Gender], ed. Damaris Nübling and Stefan Hirschauer, University of Mainz, Germany. This volume will be published by De Gruyter in March 2018.

Personal names are a critical factor in establishing the division into two genders. The essays in this volume examine the gender impact of personal names from linguistic-onomastic, sociological, and historical viewpoints. They investigate, among others, informal names in close relationships, the naming of the unborn, renaming transsexuals, and German, Dutch, and Swedish unisex names.

The language of the volume is German. It will be available in hardback and ebook format.