Raven’s Work in Tlingit Ethno-geography

Chapter in the publication: Holton, Gary and Thomas F.Thornton. (Eds.) Language and Toponymy in Alaska and Beyond: Papers in Honor of James Kari. Language Documentation & Conservation Special Publication no. 17. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press.Ye

Ubiquitous Place Names Standardization and Study in Indonesia

Place names play a vital role in human society. Names exist in all languages and place names are an indispensible part of International communication. This has been acknowledged by the establishment of the United Nations Group of Experts on Geographical Names (UNGEGN). One of UNGEGN's tasks is to coordinate International efforts on the proper use of place names. Indonesia supports this effort and through its National Geospatial Agency (BIG). Place names are also of interest as an object of study in themselves. Academic studies into place names are found in linguistics, onomastics, philosophy and a number of other academic disciplines. This article looks at these two dimensions of place names, standardization efforts under the auspices of International and national bodies, and academic studies of names, with particular reference to the situation in Indonesia

Una mirada a un grupo de nombres de lugar de reciente creación en un municipio español: algunas semejanzas y diferencias con los topónimos antiguos

The present work is focused on toponyms of recent creation. These new place names have generally received less attention among scholars than those with a long history, which have often generated passionate debates and academic papers about their origins. The group analyzed here was discarded from the index list resulting from a toponymy survey made in the village of Gata (Cáceres) in 2014. They are less than one hundred years old, and do not appear to be registered as toponyms in any known written source. However, their analysis reveals that the necessity for a social community to give names to the places it inhabits, and the process for the creation of new toponyms has essentially not changed for centuries.El presente trabajo se centra en los topónimos de reciente creación. Este grupo ha recibido generalmente menos atención por parte de los investigadores que aquellos otros que cuentan con una historia más larga, los cuales han sido con frecuencia objeto de apasionados debates acerca de su origen y generado numerosos trabajos académicos. La nómina de los aquí analizados está formada por el grupo de los no tomados en consideración para formar porte del corpus topónimo de Gata (Cáceres) efectuado en 2014 por tener menos de un siglo de antigüedad y no aparecer en ninguna de las fuentes escritas consultadas. Sim embargo, su análisis revela que para una comunidad rural la necesidad de darle un nombre a los lugares de su entorno y el proceso de creación de nuevos topónimos no ha variado sustancialmente desde la antigüedad

Maritime Indonesia and the Archipelagic Outlook; Some Reflections From a Multidisciplinary Perspective on Old Port Cities in Java

The present paper reflects on Indonesia\u27s status as an archipelagic state and a maritime nation from a historical perspective. It explores the background of a multi-year research project into Indonesia\u27s maritime past currently being undertaken at the Humanities Faculty of Universitas Indonesia. The multidisciplinary research uses toponymy, epigraphy, philology, and linguistic lines of analysis in examining old inscriptions and manuscripts and also includes site visits to a number of old port cities across the archipelago. We present here some of the core concepts behind the research such as the importance of the ancient port cities in a network of maritime trade and diplomacy, and link them to some contemporary issues such as the Archipelagic Outlook. This is based on a concept of territorial integrity that reflects Indonesia\u27s national identity and aspirations. It is hoped that the paper can extend the discussion about efforts to make maritime affairs a strategic geopolitical goal along with restoring Indonesia\u27s identity as a maritime nation

The names of the town and villages of Gozo (Malta)

The Maltese islands have been dominated by various rulers who left an imprint on the life, customs, and language of the inhabitants. This is evident also in the toponymy of the archipelago. The names of places, towns, and villages of the larger island, Malta, provide interesting samples of these admixtures. The names of the town and villages of Gozo are no exception. The legal name of the capital, Victoria, reflects the very recent history of the islands; Malta under British rule. However, its older one, Rabat, and most of the names of the villages and smaller inhabited areas, corroborate the dominating Semitic element in the Maltese language, and the mixed history of the islands and their people. This paper gives a hypothetical etymology, together with a descriptive linguistic picture, of each of the names, and discusses the relationship each has within the prismatic context of the Maltese language, but especially toponymy.peer-reviewe

Rural Autochthony? The Rejection of an Aboriginal Placename in Ballarat, Victoria, Australia

This article addresses the question of why the name ‘Mullawallah’, advanced by local Wada wurrung for a new suburb in the Ballarat area, was contested and rejected by residents. It argues that the intersection between corporate profit, government policy and meaning-based issues of belonging should be highlighted for a deeper understanding of practices around place naming. The contextual conditions regarding the democratisation of place-naming policy, overwhelming power of commercial developers to ‘name Australia’ with marketable high status names and a ‘carpentered’ pastoral environment ‘emptied’ of the Indigenous population, created an environment conducive for the contests over naming. The Indigenous people appeared to have been wiped from the landscape and the worldview of settler locals. Concepts of ‘locals’ and ‘rural autochthony’ prove useful for understanding the ambiguities of belonging and placename attachment in Australia. The article argues that cultural politics of naming remains a contested social practice

Name structures and name survival

No abstract available

Linking early geospatial documents, one place at a time: annotation of geographic documents with Recogito

Recogito is an open source tool for the semi-automatic annotation of place references in maps and texts. It was developed as part of the Pelagios 3 research project, which aims to build up a comprehensive directory of places referred to in early maps and geographic writing predating the year 1492. Pelagios 3 focuses specifically on sources from the Classical Latin, Greek and Byzantine periods; on Mappae Mundi and narrative texts from the European Medieval period; on Late Medieval Portolans; and on maps and texts from the early Islamic and early Chinese traditions. Since the start of the project in September 2013, the team has harvested more than 120,000 toponyms, manually verifying almost 60,000 of them. Furthermore, the team held two public annotation workshops supported through the Open Humanities Awards 2014. In these workshops, a mixed audience of students and academics of different backgrounds used Recogito to add several thousand contributions on each workshop day. A number of benefits arise out of this work: on the one hand, the digital identification of places – and the names used for them – makes the documents' contents amenable to information retrieval technology, i.e. documents become more easily search- and discoverable to users than through conventional metadata-based search alone. On the other hand, the documents are opened up to new forms of re-use. For example, it becomes possible to “map” and compare the narrative of texts, and the contents of maps with modern day tools like Web maps and GIS; or to analyze and contrast documents’ geographic properties, toponymy and spatial relationships. Seen in a wider context, we argue that initiatives such as ours contribute to the growing ecosystem of the “Graph of Humanities Data” that is gathering pace in the Digital Humanities (linking data about people, places, events, canonical references, etc.), which has the potential to open up new avenues for computational and quantitative research in a variety of fields including History, Geography, Archaeology, Classics, Genealogy and Modern Languages

Identities with historical regions – are they adapting to modern administrative division? The case of Ukraine

Historical regions remain the most common basis for the formation or promotion of regional identities in Europe. However, regions and regional identities are in the process of constant formation and can change significantly in line with new conditions. In this paper we focused on the changes of the spatial spread of identities with historical regions in Ukraine in comparison to the initial boundaries of those. The results show that identities with historical regions are markedly adapting to modern administrative boundaries. At the same time, the symbolic value of historical regions constitutes an essential element of identity building in contemporary administrative regions