Abstract
With his book Insular Toponymies: Place-naming on Norfolk Island, South Pacific and Dudley Peninsula, Kangaroo Island, Joshua Nash opens up a new area for placename studies, pointing to “the need t...
Highlights
As Nash points out, the story of Bev McCoy is enlightening in that did the Islander crucially contribute to his very knowledge of the Norf’k language but he was inspiring in terms of the methodological and theoretical approach adopted
An example is provided by the fourth chapter, “Linguistic aspects of Norfolk Island toponymy,” by far the most extensive of the book, in which he provides copious lists of placenames
Even though the term “pristine” is used throughout the book, as the author himself acknowledges, his main interest lies in the “contrasts—official versus unofficial, embedded versus unembedded and to a lesser extent pristine versus nonpristine” (7). One wonders how his development of the concept of “pristine” is framed within a study that mostly relies on toponyms whose histories are known: “[t]he study of Norfolk Island and Dudley Peninsula toponymy contributes to pristine placenaming because people remember a large amount of placename history” (7)
Summary
Insular Toponymies: Place-naming on Norfolk Island, South Pacific and Dudley Peninsula, Kangaroo Island. Notable is the fact that an “ecolinguistic perspective poses language as an embedded cultural and ecological artifact related intricately to the place where the language is spoken” (37) or one of the further claims advanced in the closing chapter according to which an “ecolinguistic approach to toponymy considers both linguistic structure and cultural content” (117). Be it ecolinguistic or not, the approach seems to a large extent to revolve around the author’s immersive and fruitful experience mentioned above:. [M]y ecolinguistic fieldwork methodology (detailed in the following pages) holds that sustained contact, conducting research affably, good interpersonal dealings, the establishment of friendships, and even the exchanging of gifts are what constitute a good fieldwork process. [ ... ] it claims that both fieldwork and fieldworker are interacting with and within the community and are not separated from the linguistic ecology. (38-39)
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