The ANS is pleased to announce the launch of its official YouTube channel, home to videos from the 2021 and 2022 annual conferences. Currently we have 53 videos available, and will be adding more content from ANS events as they happen.
We are delighted that the amazing content from our conferences will now be available to everyone interested in onomastics. Please share on social media and with anyone who is fascinated with names.
Goulbourn Museum shares the story of Ottawa’s oldest military settlement and early life in the former Goulbourn Township. Located just south of Stittsville in Ottawa’s west end, Goulbourn Museum houses a diverse collection of artefacts and interactive exhibitions.
The Museum is excited to announce a new series “WHAT’S IN A NAME”. In this series Museum staff will explore the story behind names that appear throughout Goulbourn Township. Their first topic: A Transparent Look at Sir Henry Goulburn and Slavery.
Staff are actively conducting research and gathering knowledge and diverse perspectives on the subject of Sir Henry Goulburn. They are looking forward to sharing the results of their research and hosting an in-depth discussion.
The article by Ana Lucia Araujo examines walls of names commemorating the victims of Atlantic slavery and the slave trade in US heritage sites and museums. By exploring how, during the twentieth century, memorials of wars and genocides in Europe, Africa, and the Americas have featured walls of names to honor the dead, this article proposes a genealogy of the walls of names, by emphasizing the various contexts in which this device has been employed. Whereas naming has been a long-standing practice to honor the dead since antiquity, naming enslaved individuals in ship manifests or farm books was part of a process of dehumanization. Yet, during the last 30 years, emerging initiatives commemorating slavery incorporated walls of names to recognize the humanity of enslaved men, women, and children. By looking at a few case studies in the United States, the article seeks to understand how effectively this specific kind of memorial has been employed to recognize and pay homage to the victims of slavery.
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.
How did your bit of London get its name? The Londonist has made a map. This shows significant places from all over Greater London, represented to show how they got their names.
Etymology can be a game of probabilities. Many place names were shaped so long ago that nobody can be certain if any one explanation is correct. Croydon, for example, is usually said to get its name from ‘valley of crocuses’, but other suggested derivations include ‘settlement near fresh water’, ‘crooked valley’ or ‘chalk hill’. For that reason, the labels they’ve put on the map are not universally accepted, and are open to debate.
If you’d like to make a suggestion regarding the map, be it a new addition or an alteration to an existing location, please contact Matt Brown on matt@londonist.com.
By C. J. Hughes
Place names come and go — with help from (surprise!) the real estate industry — but a few that have stuck around offer a window onto the city’s past.
by Lindsey Spinks
Manhattan, for all its charms, can sometimes fail the imagination. From the “financial district” to “Midtown” to the “Upper West Side,” the names of neighborhoods can seem just-the-facts dull, seeming to prefer literal and safe over style and mystery.
It wasn’t always this way. Checkering the borough once were names far more novel, like Mackarelville (on the Lower East Side), San Juan Hill (on the Upper West Side) and Jones Wood (on the Upper East Side), names which frequently got wiped off maps with the help of developers.
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To determine the most common last name in every country, NetCredit analyzed surname data from genealogy portal Forebears.io, various country censuses and other sources. Etymological information came from the Oxford Dictionary of American Family Names, the Oxford Dictionary of Family Names in Britain and Ireland, and a number of other sources.
The United States is representative of the mix of surnames found throughout the North American continent. Brown, the most common surname in Jamaica, is the fourth most popular U.S. surname. Rodriguez, the most common surname in Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Panama and the Bahamas, is also very common in the U.S. The list of the top 25 surnames in the United States includes the most common surname in two-thirds of North American countries.
The Dictionary has been realized by John Everett-Heath and comprises over 11,000 entries.
This dictionary explores the history, meanings, and origin of place names around the world. It covers continents, countries, regions, islands, bays, capes, cities, towns, deserts, lakes, mountains, and rivers, giving the name in the local language as well as key historical facts associated with many place names.
The fifth edition includes two recent county name changes: that of Swaziland to Eswatini and the final resolution of the long-running dispute about the name of the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, which has become Northern Macedonia.
In addition to the entries themselves, the dictionary includes a glossary of foreign word elements which appear in place-names and their meaning, as well as a list of personalities and leaders who have influenced the naming of places around the world.
The Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority, the Australian Hydrographic Office and the Queensland Department of Environment and Heritage Protection have an agreed process for naming reefs and other undersea geographic features within the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park. The tripartite agreement was made in the 1980s because of the often ambiguous and overlapping roles between state and Commonwealth agencies in the naming of undersea geographic features within the Marine Park.
For example, a reef 210 kilometres east-north-east of Mackay now bears the name Joe Baker Reef in honour of the world-renowed marine scientist and one of our foundational board members. Professor Joe Baker, who passed away in 2018, was a dedicated Queensland scientist passionate about marine conservation.
Lancaster’s Department of History recently completed the project ‘Pathways to understanding 16th century Mesoamerican geographies’, directed by Raquel Liceras-Garrido, together with Katherine Bellamy.
Under the umbrella of the TAP-ESRC project ‘Digging into Early Colonial Mexico’ (DECM), this spin-off project combines interactive texts, images and maps with online interactive learning resources on the history, archaeology and geography of the Mesoamerican Postclassical and Colonial period of Central Mexico, covering the 14th to the mid-16th century.
These resources are divided into three main areas: A History of Mexico, Tracing Toponymy and Depicting Geographies. The dataset will be used for training and research purposes at Lancaster in the MA History, and also in the new MA in Digital Humanities starting this autumn.
