The Collection of Place Names by Small Expeditions

Abstract

Listen

Translate article

IT will be wrELL to acknowledge straight away that the field collection of names in a foreign country cannot be properly done except by a highly competent or specially trained linguist. There are two principal reasons for this. Sounds divorced from meaningful context are extremely difficult to hear even in one's own language? how often one has to have an unfamiliar name or address spelled out. A foreign tongue, which may have many sounds that do not exist in the traveller's own language, is virtually impossible to hear correctly. It is not difficult in Arabia, for example, to find io wildly different spellings of a single original name recorded by 10 travellers over a period of 20 years. The second and probably the greatest impediment to accur? ate recording of place names is the double difficulty of ensuring that the informant understands what is being asked about and that his reply is correctly interpreted topographically. Different peoples view the land and their physical surroundings often in very different ways according to their needs and their mode of life and thus have different naming habits. You may see a river, pure and simple?he may see an unfordable stretch of that river which will have a different name from the same river further upstream; you may see a hill?he may see and name only a pasture thereon; you may see a plain clearly bounded?he may see and name only a part of that plain covered by a certain sort of scrub. Locality and area names in particular are fraught with difficulties of comprehension and delimitation, the solution to which will require as detailed a knowledge of the way of life of the local inhabitants as of their language. There are also a number of lesser but often unpredictable difficulties, as, for example, the hazards attendant upon the use of a native interpreter, which are too obvious to need elaboration. Nevertheless, small expeditions do often go to places which are badly mapped or not mapped at all and their names collection can help considerably in subsequent understanding and handling of the toponymy of the area. It is hoped that the guide? lines here offered, viewed in the light of the observations above, will serve to make the work of small expeditions more effective in this respect. (a) If the expedition is fortunate enough to have a linguist among its members, he should as far as possible make enquiries in advance about the languages likely to be encountered and their phonetic structure, so that he may have a transcription system ready for application. In any event he should provide a detailed statement of the system or systems he has used in the recording of names. Portable tape-recorders are ideal in theory, but they are difficult to use in practice and the sound quality is usually too poor for accurate transcription. (b) In the absence of a linguist the member of the expedition entrusted with the collection of names should equip himself likewise with as much advice as he can obtain in advance. In the absence of more precise instructions he should record names in the following conventional alphabet, which was devised by the Permanent Committee on Geographical Names (PCGN) in 1954 to replace the older RGS II System.