Literature on Personal Names in English, 1954

With the evaluation of numerous sources for personal and place names in the Niederlausitz (Lower Lusatia) new information also was gained to shed further light on three place names in the Leipzig area. The Niederlausitz place name Kolkwitz and the Leipzig place name Kulkwitz, wich have a very similar historical documentation, originally were traced back to *Kolkovici, from the personal name *Kolk, and also to *Kolkovica, from an appellative *kol, respectively, the diminutive *kolk 'pile, peg, stick, pole'. A more likely possibility is probably *Golkowici, from the personal name *Golk, which has been verified as a frequent family name in Lower Lusatia. Until now one presumed that the hybrid place name Meusdorf was derived from the Sorbian personal name *Mič< Nikolaus. The oldest historical forms- 1245 Mitisdorf, 1254 Mitisdorf, and only in 1339 Miczdorf - would seem to indicate a derivation from a personal name *Mět or *Mětiš. Both are common as family names in the Lausitz. One traced the name Schkölen, a place not far from Leipzig, on the basis of *skol < *sьkolь,, back to kol 'pile' and arrived at the meaning of a 'settlement near or with a palisade rampart', also because there is a circular rampart in the vicinity of the village. We have traced back the Niederlausitz place names Schollen and Schuhlen, which based on a chain of evidence closely correspond to Schkölen, to *Skolin, from the personal name *Skola, which was often used as a family name in the Niederlausitz. This interpretation is most probably also valid for Schkölen. This article once again demonstrates the close relationships between personal names and place names.

In this paper, we examine new trends in Yorùbá personal names that are first names among Yorùbá Christians. The data used include data drawn from previous studies on Yorùbá personal names, the lists of names of the candidates of the Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board of Nigeria the lists of staff of three Nigerian universities, some attendance registers of pupils in nursery, primary and secondary schools as well as participant observation. We show that the European or established Churches and the newly founded autochthonous Nigerian Churches have different influences on Yorùbá naming system and tradition-based Yorùbá personal or first names. We also indicate that, at present, there is a complete cultural shift from the use of tradition-based Yorùbá personal names as first names to the use of biblical or Christian names and that this new dimension is as a result of the influence of western culture or civilization and the newly founded churches in Nigeria. We further show that the activities that are shrouded in fanaticism, flavours, modernisation and especially names that endear the Nigerian believers to one another are meant to prove that the newly founded autochthonous Nigerian churches understand the Bible teachings better than the European churches and that name modification or name change is inevitable when there is acculturation.

LATVIAN SURNAMES OF TOPONYMIC ORIGIN: A COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS Summary This article is devoted to the question of the origin of Latvian surnames in comparison with personal names in the neighbouring languages – Estonian, Finnish, Lithuanian, Polish, Russian, and German. It is well known in onomastics in general that surnames usually are derived from appellatives and from personal or place names. Since the Latvian system of personal names is rather new, the majority of surnames of Latvian origin are coined on the basis of Latvian appellatives with various meanings. There are many fewer surnames coined from other personal names (there are rather few surnames of patronymic origin). The surnames, which can be supposed to be of toponymic origin (related to concrete geographical objects) are also few in number. But actually it is very difficult to recognize them, because semantically they are very close to the surnames the primary denotation of which is location. Primary personal names derived from place names denote: place from which a person comes; place where a person lives; or place where a person owns property. This type of Latvian personal names has been known from as far back as the 15th-16th centuries. Nowadays there are Latvian surnames coined from Latvian estate names, hydronyms, and a very few from the names of foreign geographical objects. Most often the place name with Ø affixation or with a suffix becomes a surname. Moreover, suffixes denoting inhabitants (-nieks, -ietis) are used in the derivational process. Comparison with other neighbouring languages shows that the situation with regard to surnames is similar also in Estonian and Finnish. It seems that in Finnish the most common way of deriving surnames is from place names.

The paper presents the exegetical role that the Old Testament names of places and persons have in Augustine’s exegesis of the Psalms within his commentary Enarrationes in Psalmos. It presents the vocabulary used by Saint Augustine within the Enarrationes in Psalmos to talk about the different meanings that Scripture has (literal, spiritual, allegorical). It suggests that for Saint Augustine everything within the Scriptures has a meaning, and so also all the names of persons and places that are in the texts of the Psalms - or within their titles - have a meaning for the believer. It also makes a brief presentation of Augustine’s sources for this exegetical work, underlining the influence of Jerome’s work Liber Interpretationis Hebraicorum Nominum. Finally it presents briefly the main theological ideas that Saint Augustine derives in his Enarrationes in Psalmos from his exegetical work with the names of persons and places, having as a leitmotiv the idea of the peregrinatio. The believer is a pilgrim that goes from the Earthly Babylon (which is interpreted by Augustine as confusion) to the heavenly Jerusalem, name that is interpreted as uisio pacis.

Chapter 18 - Neural correlates of recognition and naming of famous persons and landmarks: A special role for the left anterior temporal lobe

This paper presents some sociolinguistic observations on the impact of changing political, economic and sociocultural factors on names and naming practices in different administrative regions of Ethiopia. The approach is contrastive by which we compare judicially-changed personal names during three periods, namely 1963-65, 1973-1975, 1993-1995 (E.C.). The study uses empirical data, consisting of actual occurrences of personal proper names collected from the public notices that appeared during the three periods in two Amharic newspapers: the daily Addis Zämän and the weekly Yäzareyitu Ityopya and personal interviews with notable personalities such as religious leaders. The data show the nature of the differences between the personal proper names undergoing changes within the specified periods. Among the changes in the personal names, the majority were changes in one's own name and the second name-change was that of the father or grandfather or change in all three. Finally, when these names were analyzed, it was found that the changes were often from Moslem or chosen family names to Christian names, but sometimes also from a personal name designating a certain ethnic group to a different one. It is argued here that these changes can be largely explained by the political, economic and sociocultural changes that have occurred in Ethiopian society.

Communal Interdependence in The Battle of Maldon

This article reports on a naming practice that is taking place among young Chinese and Koreans: the appropriation of the English personal name. Most young Chinese and Koreans seem to have an English personal name alongside their ethnic personal name. Yet, in sharp contrast young Japanese seldom seem to adopt an English personal name. This article explores the reasons behind these differences in English personal name adoption, and tests the assumption that Chinese and Koreans adopt English personal names because Westerners have difficulty pronouncing ethnic personal names. My conclusions are based on the results of a survey on English personal name use given to university students of Chinese, Japanese and Korean ethnicity living in Canada. The results suggest that the adoption of English personal names by young Chinese and Koreans is as much a cultural phenomenon as a pragmatic one.

This article explores the linguistic-cultural aspects and usage of phraseological units involving personal and place names in English. The introductory sections outline the linguistic features of proper names and phraseological units. The qualitative part of this study provides a list of units belonging to four phraseological types (idioms, stereotyped similes, binomials, formulae), drawn from idiom dictionaries. An investigation of the sources of names shows that the personal and place names involved are historically, socially or culturally prominent in British culture. Here is noted a predominance of personal over place names, and within the former, a predominance of male over female names, and first names over family names, with a number of hypocorisms. The quantitative part of the study consists of a corpus search of the selected units in the British National Corpus in order to find their frequency and distribution across registers. The search reveals that they have very low levels of occurrence, and are more commonly used in written registers, in particular, in fiction, journalism and miscellaneous texts.

Onomastic Contributions to the Settlement History of the Dobrilugk Monastery This essay contains an analysis of the Slav and German place and personal names of the area under investigation in order to come to conclusions about the settlement history of the former monastery of Dobrilugk. The findings of Slav archæology are taken into account in this process. According to evidence from place names and archaeological finds the area of the lower Kleine Elster was settled relatively late by the Sorbs, as the Slav place names of the monastery area do not belong to the oldest groups. Inhabitants’ names ending in -ici and the names of the group Kosobudy/Žornosěky are therefore missing, the -jane-names are only represented by Dollenchen. The German place names can generally be regarded as typical of the period of eastern settlement. There is a preponderance of names ending in -dorf, followed by those ending in -aue. Those Slav personal names studied from the middle of the 16th Century from the seminary are similarly very different from the names of central Lower Lusatia. The picture provided by German personal names, in this case surnames, around Dobrilugk, is determined by names from terms describing their trade and office. A table provides exact information about this. In an evaluation of settlement history the quantitative relationship of the Sorbian to the German share of the population is illustrated by means of a map. The German inhabitants are in the majority. From the evidence of the place names there were Franks among the German settlers, but the majority came from the Low German language area. Dutch settlers played an important role in the cultivation of the land.

The spread of Christianity throughout the Roman Empire made the connection between religious concepts and names more important for the early Christians. Late Antiquity witnesses the beginnings of specifically Christian name giving. This process is characterized by various points of contact with other religions as well as the need to distance oneself from other religions. This text examines aspects of early medieval Christian name giving and its incorporation of both ancient and Gentile pagan naming patterns. Guiding questions are: Why did the Christian name inventory — very differently from the East — not take a stronger hold in the West? Are there early Medieval texts referring to the semantic content of personal names that were considered to be Christian or heathen? Different from the Roman East, where we find a slow but lasting Christianization of personal names in late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages, a similar development cannot be traced on western Roman soil. While East Rome spread the practice of giving Christian names to the Slavic missionary areas in the course of the Middle Ages, the Catholic Church did not exert a similar influence on the choice of personal names. Name changes as an expression of a conversion to Christianity did not play a prominent role. The pagan theophoric personal names of Greek-Latin Antiquity were not completely eliminated, and new Germanic personal names became part of the name inventory of the early Romance languages as a result of the prestige the ruling Gentile elites enjoyed. It is striking that in the texts by clergymen that contain interpretations of names hardly any comment can be found regarding the theophoric heathen name elements even though there are indications that the names of the gods were understood.

There have been few analyses of place-name usage in Old Norse poetry. We have the odd article discussing names in poems such as Ynglingatal (e.g. Noreen 1925; Akerlund 1939; Vikstrand 2004) and, of course, the related Old English Beowulf and Widsið . There are many cases where single names found in eddic poetry have been commented on and etymologised, but no one has, to our knowledge, taken a holistic approach to this material. The personal names of gods, goddesses, giants, dvergar (‘dwarfs’), etc. in the poems have attracted more interest (for an overview, see Mundal 1990). Our aims in this chapter are: first, to outline some of the material; second, to probe the meaning of the names (hence their etymology); and third, to see if there are any noticeable tendencies indicative of toponymic ‘genres’, especially between the mythological and the heroic poems. It is impossible to cover all the place names mentioned in the Codex Regius here; therefore, we concentrate on three of the most important poems for mythological place names – Vǫluspa, Vafþruðnismal , and Grimnismal – taking them as samples which may enable us to draw some conclusions. One would expect the mythological poems to contain descriptive, fictional names, enhancing the mythic story, while in the heroic poems more ‘real-world’ place names might be expected, employed to situate the heroes within a European heroic past. The skaldic poems, in particular Ynglingatal , have many more place names; these add plausibility to the historical claims made in the poems, although the geographical designations may or may not be historically valid. Names comprise an important element of frœði , or mythological knowledge. Take Vafþruðnismal , a contest of frœði , for instance. The wisest of all giants asks his unknown interlocutor for four names: two personal names and two place names, and when he answers all four correctly, Vafþruðnir admits: froðr ertu nu, gestr ( Vm 19/1) (‘wise you are now, guest’). Oðinn, on the other hand, asks for narratives instead: the origin of the cosmos, of earth, day, the seasons, and so forth, and then finally the details of ragnarǫk . In some cases the answers are little more than personal names, such as Vindsvalr, Svasuðr , or Hraesvelgr , but some of the narratives require toponyms.

The 1055 Foundation Deed of Tihany Abbey, a precious linguistic record of the Hungarian language, includes several Hungarian place names and personal names inserted into the Latin text of the charter. Research in the last decade has primarily focused on the place names of the deed, thus a modern day analysis of the relevant personal names is yet to be realised. The paper, surveying the personal names and the place names derived from personal names in the charter, intends to demonstrate that the different types of personal names (i.e. anthroponyms, hagionyms and theonyms) were included in toponyms as a result of seemingly similar tendencies in name giving and name use (based on the person’s role as a spiritual or real possessor) in the Old Hungarian period. Similarity can also be observed in the fact that both of these aspects could be expressed in grammatical forms either with or without a suffix. A comparison of the two subtypes reveals a minor distinction: while suffixless toponyms derived from the name of a patron saint, referring to spiritual ownership, can be found in several other languages, suffixless place names indicating real, factual possession indicate characteristically Hungarian name giving practices. The early name stock of the charter also attests that the practice of giving suffixless toponyms indicating possession can be traced to previous name giving strategies in the Hungarian language, thus its origins are not in the spread of the systematic use of place names referring to the patron saint of the settlement.

This study identified and cataloged the legends of place names and historical figures from a compilation of oral narratives collected from nine regions nationwide, as documented in the 『Comprehensive Korean Oral Literature』 and the 『Complementary Edition of Comprehensive Korean Oral Literature』. For this, text mining techniques were employed, involving the analysis process of “data collection → preprocessing of regional information → preprocessing of proper nouns → analysis of regional folklore → data generation.” First, we collected data on 26,542 oral narrative titles and preprocessed the regional information, which was not organized by administrative divisions at the “provincial” level. Subsequently, we categorized the data into nine regions. Next, we conducted a task to identify proper nouns that were not recognized by the morphological analyzer and registered them as nouns. In this process, we used the “associated word network” analysis technique to identify proper nouns. Once the preprocessing task of verifying and modifying the proper nouns was completed, we extracted the frequency of the nouns in each region. Then, to select nouns that guarantee the uniqueness of the region, the frequency was “normalized” and the value was “scaled.” Additionally, the criterion for selecting the unique place names and people of each region was defined by the term “maximum regional share” and selected as 80%.&#x0D; As a result, 520 nouns were extracted, of which only proper nouns corresponding to place and personal names were filtered. Based on this, for legends of place names, place names were classified into “natural features,” “artificial features,” and “village names” for each region, according to the “nature of the evidence.” This list has been compiled. In the legends of historical figures, the corresponding personal names are presented for each region. Legends of place names are crucial as they reveal how residents of each region shape and give meaning to their lives in the “space where history intersects.” However, legends of historical figures deserve attention for their exploration of individuals in the region who have been marginalized or excluded from historical awareness accumulated over time and documented in written records.

The sancak of Amid (today known as Diyarbakır) has been ruled by the Byzantines, Arabs, Selçukids, Artukids, Ayyubids, Akkoyunlus and Ottomans. Therefore the sancak has been exposed to the cultures of these states. Thus the province had undergone a great cultural impact which can clearly be traced in the personal and place names used in the sancak. The place and personal names recorded in the 1518 Ottoman cadastral survey of the sancak of Amid are the basis of some pointers made in this article.