An international comparative studies conference entitled “Language and Culture: Dirty, Repulsive, Unwanted” will be held from the 18th to the 19th of September in Poznan, Poland. The conference is being conjointly sponsored by the Department of Comparative Culture Studies and the Institute of Linguistics at Adam Mickiewicz University. The purpose of the conference is to provide researchers an opportunity to present and discuss recent insights into the nexus between language, literature, and culture studies with regards to forbidden language and the language of the forbidden, the unwanted in lexicography and other spheres of communication, as well as taboo language in general. The deadline for submission of an abstract proposal (max. 400 words) is May 31, 2017. The call for papers (in English) is here. More on this event can be found at this website.
Should Your Husband Change His Name For You?
In an article at Entity magazine, An Nguyen looks at the tradition of changing surnames upon marriage – who did, who does, and who will. So what is so important about a surname that people want to keep it even after marriage? And what factors push women to adopt their husband’s name – or not? Read on to look at the history of name changes and predictions for the future. Special appearance by ANS member Dr. Donna Lillian!
CSSN: Canadian Society for the Study of Names, Toronto, Canada, May 27-28 2017
The Canadian Society for the Study of Names (CSSN) / Société canadienne d’onomastique (SCO) will hold its annual meeting as part of the Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences at Ryerson University, Toronto, Canada, May 27 and 28, 2017. The theme of the 2017 congress is: “The Next 150, On Indigenous Lands”.
Have you ever thought about the names of the places where you live? Or the first names of your neighbours? Or the names of things that you eat? The conference takes place over two days. About 15 papers are normally presented, 20 minutes plus 10 minutes discussion. Topics concern any aspects of names and naming. Presenters are normally from the fields of Linguistics, Geography, History, Anthropology, and other areas.
Why Samsung’s name for its personal assistant may twist quite a few tongues
Washington Post reporter Hayley Tsukayama interviews linguists and branding experts about the name of Samsung’s new personal assistant, Bixby. While the name is short and unique, it may pose difficulties for speakers of languages other than English – including Korean! (Samsung is a Korean company.) Bonus: quotes from Laurel Sutton, ANS Information Officer:
Bixby can also be a good brand for Samsung because it doesn’t have many preexisting associations with it, said Laurel Sutton, co-founder of the naming firm Catchword, linguist and information officer for the American Name Society.
ICOS2017: XXVI International Council of Onomastic Science, University of Debrecen, Hungary, August 27-Sept. 1 2017
The International Council of Onomastic Science will be holding its next congress at the University of Debrecen in Hungary from the 27th of August to the 1st of September 2017. The theme of this year’s conference is “locality and globality of the world in names.” Several different symposia will be featured at this year’s meeting, for example, “International onomastic cooperations and projects”; “Systematical relations between toponyms and anthroponyms”; and “Applied Onomastics in practice”. Early-bird registration for ICOS2017 has been officially opened; go here for information.
The International Council of Onomastic Sciences (ICOS) is the international organisation for all scholars who have a special interest in the study of names (place-names, personal names, and proper names of all other kinds). The aim of the Council is the advancement, representation and co-ordination of name research on an international level and in an interdisciplinary context.
U.S. surnames in the 2010 Census
The U.S. Census Bureau recently released the 2010 Census surnames product, a table of all last names occurring at least 100 times in the 2010 Census returns. For each of the 162,000 last names, the table includes its frequency, national rank, and breakdown by Hispanic origin and race category. Despite the nation’s growing racial and ethnic diversity, the five most frequent American surnames in 2010 remained the same as in 2000 and were mainly reported by whites and blacks.
Smith, Johnson, Williams, Brown and Jones were the most common last names, according to a Census Bureau analysis of the 2010 Census.
This is the third in a series of data releases based on names recorded in the decennial census. Previous products tabulated name frequency from the 1990 and 2000 Censuses. The complete product, along with a methodology document, is available here.
Call for Papers: Toponyme – eine Standortbestimmung, Mainz, Germany, Sept. 18-19 2017
From the 18th to the 19th of September 2017, an international conference on toponymy entitled “Toponyme – eine Standortbestimmung” will be held in Mainz, Germany, at the Academy of Sciences and Literature. Scientific abstracts are currently being accepted on any area of toponymic research. Paper proposals are especially welcome in one of the following areas: unofficial place names; the grammar of place names; strategies for (re)naming place names; the compilation and use of large toponymic datasets; the visualization and digitalization of place name data; the relationship between place names and cartography. The deadline for abstracts is the 30th of April 2017. More information on this event can be found here.
The focus of the conference is to open up new perspectives for toponomic research, which are to flank the necessary traditional names lexography. In particular, new subjects, questions, perspectives and methods are to be developed and interfaces to post-biodiversity are to be explored, which can lead to further research projects. The conference is therefore aimed not only at representatives of linguistic name research but also for other linguistic disciplines (eg dialectology), historical and historical auxiliary sciences, archival and bibliology, geography, archeology.
Name of the Mascot for Tokyo Olympics 2020 to be decided by professionals only
The mascot of the Tokyo Olympics 2020 is to be unveiled in 2018. Proposals for the mascot’s design can be submitted by anyone of the general public. But the choice of its name will be left to professionals, in particular copywriters and jurists. The organizing committee explained that this decision is due to the complexity of an international trademark registration being too difficult for the layperson. In 2015 the Games’ logo faced allegations of plagiarism and was consequently replaced, possibly leading the committee to now err on the side of caution. “We discussed the possibility of asking the public about the name of the mascot. But as you know, it’s a much tougher task (than the design) when it involves trademark rights,” said the panel’s vice chairman, Yoshiko Ikoma.
Call for Papers: Terminology 24(2), 2018
From text mining to machine translation, the science of computational technology is essential for the acquisition and management of knowledge. Scientific papers that address the computational extraction and filtering of terminological information are currently being solicited for a special issue of Terminology, an international journal dedicated to theoretical and applied issues in specialized communication, “Computational Terminology and Filtering of Terminological Information Special Issue”. Details about the submission requirements and projected publication deadlines may be found at this website. Submission deadline: June 1st, 2017. Information about the multidisciplinary journal, Terminology, may be found at the John Benjamins online catalog.
Thanks to many years of research work, Computational Terminology has gained in strength and maturity. New requirements emerge from the current use of terminological approaches in many domains. Thus, scientific needs in fast growing domains (such as biomedicine, chemistry and ecology) and the overwhelming amount of textual data published daily demand that terminology is acquired and managed systematically and automatically; while in well established domains (such as law, economy, banking and music) the demand is on fine-grained analyses of documents for knowledge description and acquisition. Moreover, capturing new concepts leads to the acquisition and management of new knowledge. The aim of this special issue is to present and describe research work dedicated to extraction and filtering of terminological information with computational methods.
A trip to the domain name conference
Photo: Ingrid Burrington
Over at the Atlantic, Ingrid Burrington reports on a trip to NamesCon, an annual domain names conference in Las Vegas. Find out about domain name auctions, unicode, political domains, .horse domains, and dropcatchers. Here’s a sample:
The making of a “good domain name” is, I heard in conference sessions and was told repeatedly by NamesCon attendees, more alchemy than chemistry. Again, brevity is typically a good move, though memorable phrases are also effective. Some TLDs are hot right now (.io), and some single words are always a good investment (lotions.com, furs.com), but good TLDs and good words together don’t always work (as was explained to the owner of furs.io and lotions.io in one session).
What’s your favorite domain?