‘Why are there so few French place-names in England?’:An analysis of Anglo-Norman elements in English place-names as a result of the Norman Conquest

The Norman Conquest of 1066 has left a considerable mark on the English landscape (in the form of cathedrals, churches, and castles) and had a massive impact on the English language. Both of these are visible (and audible) today. It is well known that a very sizeable percentage of the vocabulary of Modern English is of French origin. What is generally realised less is the extent to which these are not loanwords in the conventional sense (that is, words incorporated from a foreign language) but terms taken over into English at a time of sustained language contact between English and French, when the two languages coexisted on English soil. Recent advances in lexicography, in the Oxford English Dictionary in particular, now make it possible to track much more precisely the processes which have led to this massive incursion of French terminology into English. Generally speaking, it is normally assumed that Anglo-Norman was a predominantly urban vernacular (Short, 2009), a view which some recent work has challenged (Rothwell 2008, 2009, 2012; Trotter 2012a, 2012b, 2013).</jats:p

Dimension of posets with planar cover graphs excluding two long incomparable chains

It has been known for more than 40 years that there are posets with planar cover graphs and arbitrarily large dimension. Recently, Streib and Trotter proved that such posets must have large height. In fact, all known constructions of such posets have two large disjoint chains with all points in one chain incomparable with all points in the other. Gutowski and Krawczyk conjectured that this feature is necessary. More formally, they conjectured that for every $k\geq 1$, there is a constant $d$ such that if $P$ is a poset with a planar cover graph and $P$ excludes $\mathbf{k}+\mathbf{k}$, then $\dim(P)\leq d$. We settle their conjecture in the affirmative. We also discuss possibilities of generalizing the result by relaxing the condition that the cover graph is planar.Comment: New section on connections with graph minors, small correction

Structure and optical properties of high light output halide scintillators

Structural and optical properties of several high light output halide scintillators and closely related materials are presented based on first principles calculations. The optical properties are based on the Engel-Vosko generalized gradient approximation and the recently developed density functional of Tran and Blaha. The materials investigated are BaBr$_2$, BaIBr, BaCl$_2$, BaF$_2$, BaI$_2$, BiI$_3$, CaI$_2$, Cs$_2LiYCl$_6$, CsBa$_2$Br$_5$, CsBa$_2$I$_5$, K$_2$LaBr$_5$, K$_2$LaCl$_5$,K$_2$LaI$_5$, LaBr$_3$, LaCl$_3$, SrBr$_2$, and YI$_3$. For comparison results are presented for the oxide CdWO$_4$. We find that the Tran Blaha functional gives greatly improved band gaps and optical properties in this class of materials. Furthermore, we find that unlike CdWO$_4$, most of these halides are highly isotropic from an optical point of view even though in many cases the crystal structures and other properties are not. This general result is rationalized in terms of halide chemistry. Implications for the development of ceramic halide scintillators are discussed