A group of English Puritans founded the Plymouth Colony in 1620, just to the south of Massachusetts Bay. Their leader, Puritan lawer and Governor John Winthrop announced the foundation of the town of Boston on September 7, 1630 with the place named after the town of Boston, in the English county of Lincolnshire, from which several prominent colonists emigrated.… Read More
Irish Minister of State for the Diaspora and International Development Ciarán Cannon T.D. has announced the 2020-2021 cohort of Fulbright Irish Awardees at an online celebration on June 11 2020. At a time when international education programmes face huge challenges, the enduring Fulbright Programme will support 36 remarkable academics, professionals and students to go to the USA and collaborate with their US counterparts. Among others, you may meet Brian Ó Doibhlin.
He is a graduate of Queen’s University Belfast, Ulster University and NUI Galway. Brian is currently a third year PhD student researching with the Northern Ireland Place-Name Project based in Queen’s, where he is also a Teaching Assistant at undergraduate level. His current research relates primarily to uncovering the origin of townland-names within a certain geographical area. His research interests include Celtic languages, onomastics, translation, and the early-modern period in Ireland. As a Fulbright FLTA, he will teach the Irish language and take classes at the University of Notre Dame.
Cover of the first issue of the New Yorker, with the figure of dandy Eustace Tilley, created by Rea Irvin
Dr. Cleveland Evans writes about names for the Omaha World-Herald. In his June 6th column, he looks at the history of the name Eustace.
Eustace is the English form of Latin Eustachius, combining Greek Eustathios “well-built” and Eustachys “fruitful.” St. Eustace was supposedly martyred in A.D. 118. According to legend, he was a Roman general who converted to Christianity when he saw a crucifix in the antlers of a stag. Eustace, his wife and sons were roasted to death inside a bronze statue of a bull after refusing to make pagan sacrifices.
Though uncommon, Eustace stayed in use among England’s nobility. It was less popular in the United States, partly because Puritans avoided names of non-Biblical saints. The 1850 United States Census found 90 Eustaces. The 1851 census of Great Britain had 188, though the two nations then had about the same population. The latest available British census of 1911 included 3,009 Eustaces. The 1910 American census had 1,057, though then the United States had almost twice as many residents.
The most famous Eustaces are fictional. In 1925 the cover of the first issue of the New Yorker featured a drawing by Rea Irvin of a monocled dandy with a top hat. Later that year, author Corey Ford named him “Eustace Tilley.” The character reinforced the name’s effete image.
The American Name Society (ANS) is inviting proposals for papers for its next annual conference, January 22-25, 2021. After serious deliberation of an official proposal made on the 8th of May 2020, the Executive Council of the American Name Society unanimously voted to hold the 2021 Annual Conference online. All presentation sessions will be held online during the four days of the conference. This means that our conference will NOT be held in conjunction with the LSA meeting, which is still slated to be held in January 2021 in San Francisco. To submit a proposal, simply complete the 2021 Author Information Form.
Abstracts in any area of onomastic research are welcome. The NEW DEADLINE for receipt of abstracts is AUGUST 1, 2020.
Please email this completed form to ANS Vice President Laurel Sutton using the following address: <laurelasutton@gmail.com>. For organizational purposes, please be sure to include the phrase “ANS 2021” in the subject line of your email.
All proposals will be subjected to blind review. Official notification of proposal acceptances will be sent on or before September 30, 2020. All authors whose papers have been accepted must be current members of the ANS. Please feel free to contact ANS Vice President Laurel Sutton should you have any questions or concerns.
A downloadable PDF of the REVISED Call for Papers can be found here.
We look forward to receiving your submission!
Exciting developments are afoot at DMNES central, as they’ve partnered with Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts for their summer internship programme, which means that the Dictionary Project has four research interns working for them for the next 8-12 weeks! So many back-burner projects are being brought to the front burner and are now already bubbling away.
In addition to working behind the scenes, each will write a few blog posts updating their progress and what they’re learning/finding out, as well as take over the twitter account for a week. Let us briefly introduce thems: Adelia Brown (majoring in Philosophy and English), Juliet Pepe (majoring in Neuroscience and Behavior), Sidney Boker (English major) and K. J. Lewis (studying Physics, Engineering and English).
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.
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.
If you enjoy reading about names, we encourage you to join the ANS and share your name news with us!… Read More
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.”
Frank Herbert’s Dune is one of the well-known science-fiction novels of the 20th century. Set in a fictional feudal universe and centered on the conflict between two powerful houses, it’s a dense book full of terminology that Herbert crafted from many sources, but that feel almost impossible to pronounce unless you’re familiar with the languages he borrowed from to give Dune its unique tone.
If you’re curious how to pronounce some of the oft-repeated terms in Dune but have no idea where to start, you’re in luck! One clever fan compiled sound clips of Herbert himself saying the words of Dune on a blog called Usul’s Homepage.
Many of the words in Dune appear to come from Arabic root words, but Herbert doesn’t actually use the proper Arabic pronunciations in his reading. It appears he anglicized much of it, perhaps intentionally or perhaps from his own misunderstanding of Arabic.
