The Linguistic Society of America is happy to be able to announce to you that the LSA 2021 Annual Meeting will be held virtually. The dates will be the same as previously scheduled: January 7-10, 2021. Please check the LSA website in the coming weeks for information about the meeting schedule, format, online platform, virtual exhibit hall, registration, and more.
Given the uncertainty until now about the format of the Annual Meeting, some of you may have chosen not to submit an abstract for a meeting which you did not expect you would be able to attend. The LSA are actively considering other ways to allow our members to present peer-reviewed research virtually some time during the period between the 2021 and 2022 Annual Meetings.
Please note that the ANS meeting will be held online during the weekend of January 22-25, 2021, and will NOT be held in conjunction with the LSA meeting.
The National Geographic Institute of Spain organizes at the occasion of its 150th anniversary in cooperation with the ICA Commission on Atlases and our Joint ICA/IGU Commission on Toponymy a meeting on atlases and toponymy in Madrid, Spain. After repeated postponing it is now definitely scheduled for 21-24 April 2021.
Ever thought about getting more involved with the American Name Society but did not know how? Here is your opportunity! The American Name Society is currently looking for a few good people who are interested in joining the Executive Council, as well as the Editorial Board. Starting January 2021, new officers will be needed to fill the positions listed below.
In 1790 General Arthur St. Clair, the first governor of the Northwest Territory and a member of the Society of the Cincinnati, did not like the name Losantiville and changed it to Cincinnati. The Cincinnati Society was named in honor of the Roman general Lucius Quinctius Cincinnatus. He lived in the Fifth century BC. While plowing his fields one day he was told to take command of Rome’s army. Within 15 days he led the army to victory over the enemy. He then went back to his plowing. The Society of the Cincinnati was started by, and consisted of, Continental Army officers of the American Revolution.
What accounts for name choices in a transnational context? What does the choice of ethnic or English names reveal about global identities and the desire to fit into a new culture? Drawing on the sociology of culture and migration, Philip Jun Fang and Gary Fine examine the intersection of naming, assimilation, and self-presentation in light of international student mobility. Based on 25 semi-structured interviews with mainland Chinese students enrolled in an elite Midwestern university, they find that these students make name choices by engaging in both transnational processes and situated practices. First, Chinese international students negotiate between multiple names to deal with ethnic distinctions. While ethnic names can signal distance from other ethnic communities, they also distinguish individuals from others. For these students, names are multi-layered and temporal: their name choices evolve throughout school lives, shaped by power relations in American cultural contexts and channeled by images of their home country. Second, multiple names allow these students to practice situated performance, incorporating the reflective self, the distinctive self, and the imagined self. The authors address “cross-cultural naming” that accounts for identity in transnational social spaces.
At its first appearance in records by explorers, the Chicago area was inhabited by a number of Algonquian peoples, including the Mascouten and Miami. The name “Chicago” is derived from a French rendering of the Native American word shikaakwa, known to botanists as Allium tricoccum, from the Miami-Illinois language. The first known reference to the site of the current city of Chicago as “Checagou” was by Robert de La Salle around 1679 in a memoir. Henri Joutel, in his journal of 1688, noted that the wild garlic, called “chicagoua”, grew abundantly in the area. According to his diary of late September 1687: “when we arrived at the said place called Chicagou which, according to what we were able to learn of it, has taken this name because of the quantity of garlic which grows in the forests in this region.”
After George Floyd, an African American, was killed during a police arrest in Minneapolis, United States, many people protested, in the United States and internationally. During the course of these protests, many controversial monuments and memorials were vandalized or toppled by protestors, prompting those in charge of other similar monuments to remove them from public view.