English Personal Names Research Articles

BASIC THEORETICAL PRINCIPLES OF PERSONAL NAMES IN ENGLISH AND UZBEK LANGUAGES

The article talks about the origin of English and Uzbek personal names, as well as the stages of formation of unique names in different periods. In the article, the structural-semantic features of English and Uzbek given names, which categories they may belong to, are approached in detail. The effect of adding suffixes before or at the end of Uzbek personal names on the gender of the person and various personal characteristics of the name owner, but English personal names have not such suffixes.

Anglo-American Cultural Influence in Slovenia: The Case of Personal Names

The article aims to address the growing tendency of Slovene native speakers towards borrowing English personal names when naming their new-borns. Statistical data confirm that foreign (and, with that, English) names have increased in the past decades, and statistical lists illustrate how in the case of personal names, ’exoticisms’ (e.g. Liam, Patrick, Nick, listed among the most popular 200 first names in the 2001-2015 period) compete with name forms that have been adapted and nativised long ago (e.g. Patrik), or are currently being introduced for the first time into Slovene. The influx of name borrowings from English is discussed from the point of view of pragmatic borrowing as advocated by Andersen (2014). A historical overview of the borrowing of English personal names into Slovene is given, and the role of English as the model discussed. Such pragmatically borrowed items carry significant sociolinguistic signals about the borrowers’ attitudes, and these are analysed, based on questionnaires completed by parents of children aged 2-6. The significance of Anglo-American cultural influence is thus sought to be evaluated.

The English-Slovene language contact: borrowing of personal names

The article aims to shed some light on the growing tendency of Slovene native speakers towards borrowing English personal names when naming new-born children. Some historical overview of the borrowing of English personal names into Slovene is given, starting with lists compiled from 1931 onwards, established from the data supplied by the Statistical Office of the Republic of Slovenia (SURS). The phenomenon of borrowing personal names is discussed from the point of view of pragmatic borrowing as advocated by G. Andersen (2014), taking into account the traditional distinction between necessary loans on the one hand and luxury loans on the other. The article illustrates how in the case of personal names, ‘exoticisms’ (e.g. Alex, Liam, Kevin, Kim, Ian, Vanessa, Adrian, Ella, Emma, Patrick, Nick, Alan, Lucas, listed among the most popular 200 first names in the 2001–2013 period) compete with name forms that have been adapted and nativised long ago (e.g. Patrik), or are currently being introduced for the first time into Slovene. In these recent borrowings, the foreign forms undergo some adaptation, but at the same time, unlike other anglicisms, show the tendency to resist complete adaptation, particularly in terms of spelling and pronunciation. Such pragmatically borrowed items carry significant sociolinguistic signals about the borrowers’ attitudes, and these are briefly commented on.

PERSONAL NAME ALIASES ON AUTOMATIC DISCOVERY FROM THE WEB

In this paper we proposed a lexical-pattern-based approach to extract aliases of a given name. We use a set of names and their aliases as training data to extract lexical patterns that describe numerous ways in which information related to aliases of a name is presented on the web. An individual is typically referred by numerous name aliases on the web. Accurate identification of aliases of a given person name is useful in various web related tasks such as information retrieval, sentiment analysis, personal name disambiguation, and relation extraction. We propose a method to extract aliases of a given personal name from the web. Given a personal name, the proposed method first extracts a set of candidate aliases. Second, we rank the extracted candidates according to the likelihood of a candidate being a correct alias of the given name. We evaluate the proposed method on three data sets: an English personal names data set, an English place names data set, and a Japanese personal names data set. The proposed method outperforms numerous baselines and previously proposed name alias extraction methods, achieving a statistically significant mean reciprocal rank (MRR) of 0.67.

Emotions in the Household: Emotion Words and Metaphors in Domesday Book Personal Names

AbstractThis paper presents an analysis of the set of emotion-related personal names recorded in the Domesday Book. Through the fine-grained analysis of the themes used in these names, this paper proposes a semantic description of late Old English personal names, which have been classified into the following seven name sub-categories: happiness, joy, love, tenderness, pride, anger, and fear. This analysis shows that emotion-related vocabulary was a favorite personal name element in post-Conquest England. Furthermore, it proposes some of the general tendencies behind name-giving practices, especially in relation to (i) gender distribution of emotion themes and concepts and (ii) frequent lexical combinations of emotion-related themes. Finally, the paper offers an interpretation of the metaphorization processes that motivated the development of some of these combinations of words and their usage as personal names in Anglo-Saxon England.

English and Romanian Personal Names as Identity Indicators in Medieval Documents

The present article is meant to point out that the information carried by personal names can be significant not only for onomastic studies proper, but also for approaches to issues of social identity. This author will analyze three medieval documents, of the ones that appear to have required precise identification of historical individuals. The documents under discussion contain personal names either by themselves or as attended by additional designative elements – ranks and titles, descriptive nicknames, places of residence, names of crafts and trades – of which many were to be recorded as official surnames in more recent times. Each of the three analyzed documents (in Old English, Medieval Latin and Romanian, respectively) contains details that reveal the emergence of the bipartite naming system that is now dominant in Europe.

Automatic Discovery of Personal Name Aliases from the Web

An individual is typically referred by numerous name aliases on the web. Accurate identification of aliases of a given person name is useful in various web related tasks such as information retrieval, sentiment analysis, personal name disambiguation, and relation extraction. We propose a method to extract aliases of a given personal name from the web. Given a personal name, the proposed method first extracts a set of candidate aliases. Second, we rank the extracted candidates according to the likelihood of a candidate being a correct alias of the given name. We propose a novel, automatically extracted lexical pattern-based approach to efficiently extract a large set of candidate aliases from snippets retrieved from a web search engine. We define numerous ranking scores to evaluate candidate aliases using three approaches: lexical pattern frequency, word co-occurrences in an anchor text graph, and page counts on the web. To construct a robust alias detection system, we integrate the different ranking scores into a single ranking function using ranking support vector machines. We evaluate the proposed method on three data sets: an English personal names data set, an English place names data set, and a Japanese personal names data set. The proposed method outperforms numerous baselines and previously proposed name alias extraction methods, achieving a statistically significant mean reciprocal rank (MRR) of 0.67. Experiments carried out using location names and Japanese personal names suggest the possibility of extending the proposed method to extract aliases for different types of named entities, and for different languages. Moreover, the aliases extracted using the proposed method are successfully utilized in an information retrieval task and improve recall by 20 percent in a relation-detection task.

English Name Use by East Asians in Canada: Linguistic Pragmatics or Cultural Identity?

AbstractThis 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.

Why is WinnieThepooh? On the use of the definite article in some english personal names1

Why is Winnie<i>The</i>pooh? On the use of the definite article in some english personal names¹

Some old English uncompounded personal names and bynames

Some old English uncompounded personal names and bynames

European Personal Names given to the Eastern Indians

IN A PAPER PUBLISHED IN 1944, I cited documents from the Maryland archives to indicate that, starting in 1704, and perhaps earlier, individual members of a band of Algonkian-speaking Choptank Indians began to be known English personal names. An individual's former Algonkian name was used as a surname to which an English given name was affixed, e.g., Betty Gaco, George Attowcase, William Ahconepatokack, Old Tom Tisehouse, James Gohonk, Bonny Glabbo, John Quash, etc. In some instances the Algonkian name was dropped entirely and the Indian was known a single European given name, e.g., Dick, Little John, Presillah, Nancy, Abram, Six Pence, etc. As time went on, the Indian names were completely changed, and 1799 individual Choptanks possessed both given names and surnames of European origin, e.g., Henry Mulberry, Mary Mulberry, Henry Sixpence, John Pike, Sarah Bishop, Tom Bis~op, Thomas Owen, etc.1 There has come to my attention evidence of a parallel naming process found in the 17th century records of the Dutch settlement at and near present Albany, N.Y.2 In 1678, a Catskill Indian whose native name was Manueenta and was by the Christians called

Old English Personal Names in Bede's History: An Etymological-Phonological Investigation

Old English Personal Names in Bede's History: An Etymological-Phonological Investigation

The Egyptian Origin of Some English Personal Names

CONTRIBUTORS to the present volume may well have reflected upon the very unusual quality of mind which enabled James Henry Breasted to conceive and inspire what he described as research laboratory for the enrichment of modern knowledge with fuller vision of the rise of man. The Oriental Institute is the monument to scholar who was human being first of all-to one who, while living ardently in the present, kept his gaze unceasingly fixed upon the past from which that present has sprung. To him, in fact, past and present were indivisible, and being imbued as he was with an intense interest in all evolution, no question of origins could be indifferent fo him. This article can deal only with small and unimportant aspect of human affairs, but, such as it is, I derive satisfaction from the thought that the topic would not have been uncongenial to my deeply regretted friend. The conclusions to be reached are unhappily mostly negative or at least highly speculative, but we are fortunate in being able to point to one common English Christian name the Egyptian origin of which is beyond question. That name is Susan, and it goes back, of course, to the pious and beautiful wife of Joakim whose story is told in an apocryphal addition to the book of Daniel. The Greek form of the name is lovaavva, and the corresponding Hebrew is ,r7'IWV, an obvious derivative of the fairly common word tgftC a lily. The Egyptian origin of the latter was pointed out long ago, whether first of all by Brugsch or some other I will not inquire. The Egyptian word for lotus was zs's'n, later zs'n.1 This in Coptic has become sio-sen, with the same assimilation of the first two radicals as that found in Coptic siouswet window, from old Sssd. Erman (ZDMG 46 [1892] 117), in accepting the view that the Hebrew sV-sian and its Arabic equivalent sftsdn are loan-

Studies on English Place and Personal Names

Studies on English Place and Personal Names

Studies on English Place and Personal Names

Studies on English Place and Personal Names