Geographical Vocabulary Research Articles

Geographical vocabulary of the Tornovsky dialect of the Moksha-Mordovian language

Geographical vocabulary existing in ethno-linguistic environment, has a significant impact on the formation of its toponymic nomenclature. This influence is manifested both in the form of toponymic formants and in the basics of geographical names originating from this ethno-linguistic environment. The relevance of this work is definted by the fact that until now geographical vocabulary of the Tornovsky dialect of the Moksha-Mordovian language, as well as other Samara-Bends dialects, was not the subject of special study, and was not introduced into academic and research circulation. The purpose of this article is description and lexico-semantic and etymological analysis of geographical vocabulary of the Tornovsky dialect of the Moksha-Mordovian language. General theoretical and methodological basis of the research was made up of the works of Russian and international researchers on the toponymy and dialectology of the Mordovian languages. Vocabulary data is based on the materials of field research that the author conducted in the village Tornovoe of the Volga district of the Samara region during the field-work in 2017 and 2018. The main methods of linguistic research are descriptive and comparative methods. They were used in the collection and analysis of linguistic material. The results of the study showed that the geographical vocabulary of the Tornovsky dialect of the Moksha-Mordovian language fully reflects all the phonetic and accentual features of this dialect. It was also revealed that there is a fundamental difference between the composition of geographical vocabulary of the Tornovsky dialect and the same vocabulary of the neighboring dialects of the Moksha-Mordvin language, Shelehmetsky and Bahilovsky. A significant part of the geographical vocabulary in tthe Tornovsky dialect is borrowed from the Russian and Turkic Kipchak languages which reflects ethnolinguistic history of its speakers.

Unquestionable Geographies

From 1810 with the publication of the first charts of the Louisiana Purchase, to 1848 with the celebration of the Mexican cession, leading U.S. cartographers like John Melish, Henry S. Tanner, S. Augustus Mitchell, and others marshaled their empirical and romantic skillsets to engage willfully and consciously in the work of empire-building. Instead of presenting static and impartial displays of geographic information, they were self-conscious and unashamed visionaries who manipulated and sometimes invented geographies, outlining the “sketchy” places with aggressive borders and labels and filling in the “silences” with make-believe topographies and hydrographies. They professed the revelation of natural designs that forecasted grand and prosperous futures. As powerful, yet fictive, expressions of dominion, maps significantly impacted the way many Americans viewed their national destiny, enticed by the geographic vocabularies that masked their chauvinisms and avarice by normalizing their territorial ambitions as natural, providential, and inevitable.

Эвенская географическая лексика в топонимии Аллаиховского улуса Республики Саха

The subject of the study is the even layer in the ulus toponymy. The theme of geographical vocabulary of even origin is chosen. The work is carried out in order to identify the geographical appellative vocabulary of the even language with a comparative method, word-formation, structural, lexical-semantic analysis. As a result, the semantic correspondence of appellative vocabulary and place names with the types of geographical objects, features of the surrounding area and landscape is revealed. The author traces the borrowings of even geographical vocabulary to the Fund of the indigir dialect of the Yakut language. The materials of the study will be used in the preparation of a short toponymic dictionary.

Semantic and stylistic aspects of using geographical vocabulary in Emily Dickinson’s verse

This article reports a study according to the tenets of empirical methodology in addressing research questions. The project tests the principles of using geographical vocabulary in Emily Dickinson’s verse. It focuses on the study of stylistic and semantic aspects of the usage of geographical vocabulary. The results demonstrate the quantitative and qualitative characteristics of the usage of geographical vocabulary. Emily Dickinson’s poems are full of geographical names, which she uses with both positive and negative connotations. As we can see, the negative connotations prevail. The results point out how Emily Dickinson manipulates geographical names at all levels of the language. In addition, the findings indicate specific color gamma of Emily Dickinson’s poems. The use of colors is different for each geographical object; especially it applies to the names of countries, towns etc. Emily Dickinson associates every continent with its own unique color. These findings demonstrate the individual style of Emily Dickinson, which is distinctive among other poets.

Привлечение памятников письменности для исследования лексики современных русских говоров (на примере донской народной географической лексики)

Привлечение памятников письменности для исследования лексики современных русских говоров (на примере донской народной географической лексики)

Lapa: da Sociabilidade na Cidade para a Sociabilidade da Cidade

Desde meados da década de 1990, a área que abrange o atual bairro da Lapa tem se configurado como uma área de forte atratividade para o lazer noturno na cidade do Rio de Janeiro. Nos fins de semana, à noite, milhares de pessoas, provenientes dos mais variados pontos da cidade, do estado, do país e do mundo se reúnem nesta pequena porção da zona periférica do centro da cidade, produzindo um grande espetáculo da vida pública. Suas ruas, praças, bares, boates, casas de show e depósitos de bebidas se transformaram em um dos mais disputados pontos de encontro noturno desta cidade ou, por outras palavras, conforme sugere o vocabulário geográfico, um lugar central para a sociabilidade noturna.

The apostle of internationalism: Stephen Duggan and the geopolitics of international education

Stephen Duggan, the educator and director of the Institute of International Education (IIE) between 1919 and 1946, has been described as an ‘apostle of internationalism’. Duggan's work as the director of a new international agency in the co-ordination of educational exchange sought to position the United States of America as the centre of international education. Duggan's writings during this period reflect the articulation of a geographical vocabulary which positioned the United States as a steward of an ‘international’ space of education despite Duggan's continual disparagement of cultural imperialism. This paper explores the geographies of Duggan's discursive rendering of American responsibilities for the security of ‘the international’, the potential for America to act as a beacon of educational exchanges, and as the ‘rational’ space to counteract threats to an imagined American educational hegemony. This outline was shot through with the anxiety of alternative internationalisms and the possibility for education to be used in opposition to the ‘virtuous’ international education proposed by Duggan and his contemporaries. An exploration of Duggan's writing provides a backdrop to the development of international educational agencies in the interwar period as critical technologies of an American geopolitical power.

Have the human geographical can(n)ons fallen silent; or were they never primed?

A disciplinary canon comprises a body of work – almost invariably textual – that is represented as highly influential in its development, laying the foundations on which contemporary practices have been built. Such works, most often books, are sources that all students should address to appreciate the disciplinary fundamentals – where it has come from and whose shoulders it rests on. This implies progress, of the discipline advancing on those foundations. This is not the case with Anglophone human geography, however; whereas until c.1960 the discipline's practices could be traced back to the writings of a small number of key scholars, many German or French, those works are now very rarely the subject of close study. The discipline has fissured into many constituent strands each of which has had core figures and classic works that have guided practices but without the stability expected of a canonical tract. Arguably, Anglophone geography has been defined less by its canonical works but rather by its canonical concepts – space, place (region, milieu, and locale), and environment. These build on earlier advances in geographical vocabulary and visualisation. Contestation over their meanings and the diverse sources of influence and inspiration in human geography connects with questions about comparative canonization amongst disciplines and past and present challenges to geography's status and future.

Linking geographic vocabularies through WordNet

The linked open data (LOD) paradigm has emerged as a promising approach to structuring and sharing geospatial information. One of the major obstacles to this vision lies in the difficulties found in the automatic integration between heterogeneous vocabularies and ontologies that provides the semantic backbone of the growing constellation of open geo-knowledge bases. In this article, we show how to utilize WordNet as a semantic hub to increase the integration of LOD. With this purpose in mind, we devise Voc2WordNet, an unsupervised mapping technique between a given vocabulary and WordNet, combining intensional and extensional aspects of the geographic terms. Voc2WordNet is evaluated against a sample of human-generated alignments with the OpenStreetMap (OSM) Semantic Network, a crowdsourced geospatial resource, and the GeoNames ontology, the vocabulary of a large digital gazetteer. These empirical results indicate that the approach can obtain high precision and recall.

Scalar thickening: Wildlife management areas and conservation scales in southeast Tanzania

The debate on scale in geography has yielded nuanced concepts that have enhanced scale analysis and methodologies for scale‐related research. Despite this advancement, questions still linger on the value of scale as a geographical vocabulary, partly because scalar analyses remain predicated on hierarchies, which have limited explanatory power. In this paper we draw on insight from political ecology to affirm and expand on the usefulness of scale for geographical inquiry and for engaging with contemporary people–environment relations. In particular, the paper appreciates that ecology is at the core of methodological questions pertaining to the explanation of these relations and is increasingly involved in the construction of biodiversity discourses and strategies that rely heavily on conceptions of, and pronouncements on, scale. We use the concept of scalar thickness as a way of thinking about how spaces of conservation are organized and the propensity of scales to coalesce at various stages of scale‐producing processes. We argue that wildlife management areas in Tanzania have played a pivotal role in the thickening of the micro scale in the southeast region. These areas constitute the scale at and though which global conservation agendas are implemented and natural resource rights and benefits are contested.

From Frontier Policy to Foreign Policy: The Question of India and the Transformation of Geopolitics in Qing China by Matthew W. Mosca (review)

Reviewed by: From Frontier Policy to Foreign Policy: The Question of India and the Transformation of Geopolitics in Qing China by Matthew W. Mosca Ying-kit Chan (bio) Matthew W. Mosca. From Frontier Policy to Foreign Policy: The Question of India and the Transformation of Geopolitics in Qing China. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2013. viii, 398 pp. Hardcover $60.00, isbn 978-0-8047-8224-1. Geography as a discipline/field/perspective, which exists independently of historical studies, currently defines itself and its relation to history. Peter K. Bol defines humanistic geography as (1) a focus on place as something socially and culturally constructed and (2) a recognition that the ways in which humans at a given time and place relate to the environment are mediated by the ways in which they understand themselves and their relation to the world. Humanistic geography has thus allowed historical studies to make a “spatial turn” from cultural and intellectual history to quantitative social science history.1 Indeed, as Yongtao Du and Jeff Kyong-McClain have mentioned, “changes in geographical imaginings [over the last five hundred years] have been no less profound and of practical significance than changes in social, political, or economic conditions.”2 Emphasizing the analysis of geographic vocabularies in general and placenames in particular, Matthew W. Mosca avoids the slippery concepts of identity and nationalism and has very deftly revised our understanding of relations between Qing China and British India. Far from being a failing empire that was unable to control its frontiers, Qing China possessed sophisticated and flexible policies, from the frontier to the foreign, to manage its borderlands. Mosca divides his explication of the Qing policy shift into four parts, which split the book chronologically and thematically. In part 1, he explores the plethora of textual information about India before and during the first century of Qing rule. In part 2, he focuses on the Qianlong era, engaging in close readings of court survey maps, Jesuit world maps, Qing imperial gazetteers, personal geographic writings, and official documents and letters from British, Chinese, and Manchu sources. In part 3, he describes how the emergence of British India, along with the death of Qianlong, had resulted in reciprocal adjustments in geographic knowledge for a new type of geopolitical worldview to form and accommodate the concept of “British India.” In part 4, he explains how Qing foreign relations became more centralized in the decades after the Opium War to adapt to foreign imperialism while steering clear of the radical idea of a tightly integrated empire operating in close alliances with foreign powers that Wei Yuan’s writings had proposed. Breaking the mold of the Chinese universalistic imagination of all under Heaven and the tributary relations in explaining the complexities and dialectics of local-empire relations, Mosca has fused cultural and intellectual history with geography, politics, and foreign relations in his highly original and stimulating study of Qing perceptions of British India. By examining the shift in the Qing state’s external relations from a frontier policy to a foreign policy between 1750 and [End Page 651] 1860, as well as an equally significant internal change in the Qing empire’s information order in which private Han Chinese scholars began to take a greater interest in reforming the empire’s administration (pp. 2–3), Mosca reconsiders Qing foreign relations through his analytical lens of maps and written sources, which “might have influenced the strategic outlook of the state or private scholars” (pp. 6–7). Mosca argues that “the most important variable in Qing foreign relations was whether the court and private scholars considered themselves to be facing an assortment of discrete, localized challenges, or a single, integrated crisis involving the empire as a whole,” and Qing policymakers began to shift from “masterful disengagement” across many frontiers to a “grand strategy” that was comparable to that of their major rivals (p. 11), the greatest of whom were the British in India. After the Manchu rulers had defeated the Junghar Mongols and brought all of modern Mongolia and Xinjiang under their control (while gaining dominant influence in Tibet), new scholarly prominence to India as the Muslim land of Hindustan emerged in Qing China after...

A Place to Believe In: Locating Medieval Landscapes (review)

Reviewed by: A Place to Believe In: Locating Medieval Landscapes Michal Kobialka A Place to Believe In: Locating Medieval Landscapes. Edited by Clare A. Lees and Gillian R. Overing. (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press. 2006. Pp. x, 272. $65.00 clothbound; $25.00 paperback.) A collection of ten essays, edited by Clare A. Lees and Gillian R. Overing, is an extension of a conference, "A Place to Believe in: Medieval Monasticism in the Landscape," which brought together the contributors in Whitby (now North Ridding) in the summer of 2003 "in order to think about place while in place (p. 24)." The volume offers an insight into the workings of complementary fragmentation in medieval historiography. Due to greater division of labor and the bringing together of diverse subdisciplines, every one of which presents different political or ideological motivations as well as different attitudes toward an archive and evidence, such a historiographic strategy presents a reader with a nuanced understanding of the distinction between space and place. Gesturing toward Michel Foucault's analysis of spatial power relations, Michel de Certeau's spatial practices, Pierre Bourdieu's reflexive sociology, and the [End Page 627] most recent work in the field of "human/spatial geography," the editors give us an excellent introduction which describes the scope of the volume, drawing attention to the multiple readings of the concept of place—that is, as a place that "gathers" objects/things, which are both engendered by it and engender it; as a site of and for cultural memory; as a place that identifies a community on the geo-political map; as a locus of material structures; as a place that allows for the construction of the relationship between these structures and the bodies moving within it; as a place that reveals material and immaterial, real and imaginary, royal and ecclesiastical power relations; and finally, as a place that charts geographies of desire, abjection, and devotion in Anglo-Saxon England. A Place to Believe In is divided into three parts. Part One, "Place Matters," a clear reference to Butlerian "mattering of bodies," consists of essays which deal with Anglo-Saxon monuments, monasteries, and mutable boundaries. Fred Orton is concerned with the Bewcastle Monument, familiar to many art historians, and how a Heideggerian notion of a built thing could "matter" the monument anew. Focusing on Bede's silence on the geography around him in Ecclesiastical History, Ian Wood puts forth a suggestion that this silence "un-mattered" the attention to Jarrow and thus created the impression of a region much more marginalized than it really was. Kelley M. Wickham-Crowley's essay considers human marks on the landscape modified by Anglo-Saxon colonizers. Part Two, "Textual Location," focuses on the textuality of place in medieval writing. Stacy S. Klein treats place "as a profoundly social entity" (p. 113), which exerted an impact on the textual locality of the narrators of the female-voiced elegies. Ulrike Withaus reveals how Gertude of Hefta's distinct spatial and geographic vocabulary of ecstasies and visions translated an ordinary courtyard with a fishpond into a locus of a spiritual conversion for the nuns. Stephanie Hollis's discussion of strategies of emplacement and displacement enriches her argument concerning how the built environment gains significance from the lives lived within it—in her case, the life of St. Edith as commemorated by Goscelin. Diane Watt assesses the impact of the environment on Margery Kempe's piety and religious certainty. And, finally, Part Three, "Landscapes in Time," moves the reader from medieval past to a contemporary contemplation of the landscape of war and its impact on preserving, conserving, and meditation on the past as seen by Rose Macaulay (England) and Daniel Libeskind (Berlin) (Sarah Beckwith); to the assessment of the Cistercians' strategy of occupying places in the landscape while the climate changed the environmental rules under which they operated (Kenneth Addison); and to locating the views on medieval monasticism in the modern American imagination of popular and contemporary eco-culture in Oregon, in general, and in a project directed by the ecologist and community activist Richard Hart, a former member of the Institute of Christian Brothers, in particular (Ann Marie Rasmussen). The scope of the...

Mapping vernacular geography: web-based GIS tools for capturing 'fuzzy' or 'vague' entities

Most people do not use a formal geographical vocabulary, however they do use a wide variety of geographical terms on a daily basis. Identifiers such as 'Downtown' are components of a vernacular geography which is vastly more used than the coordinates and scientifically defined variables beloved of most professional analysts. Terms like these build into the jointly defined world-views within which we all act. Despite its importance for policymaking and quality of life, attention is rarely paid to this vernacular geography because it is hard to capture and use. This paper presents tools for capturing this geography, an example of the tools' use to define 'High Crime' areas, and an initial discussion of the issues surrounding vernacular data. While the problems involved in analysing such data are not to be underestimated, such a system aims to pull together professional and popular geographical understanding, to the advantage of both.

Comparing Teacher-Directed and Computer-Assisted Instruction of Elementary Geographic Place Vocabulary

Increased knowledge of geographic place name vocabulary continues to be important to student academic success. Place knowledge is a vital part of students' learning to be responsible citizens by helping them become more conscious of the world around them and preparing them to enter a global workplace. This study compares computer-assisted to teacher-directed instruction for teaching elementary geographic place name vocabulary. Direct instructional methods can improve student performance with clearly identified student objectives, structured content delivery, and monitoring of progress. Instruction provided via computers appears to be a more effective method than traditional direct instruction.

"Could I but Mark Out My Own Map of Life": Educated Women Embracing Cartography in the Nineteenth-Century American South

In the early 1870s, instead of writing a story, drawing a picture, or composing a poem, William Henry Bailey made a hand-drawn map for his ailing mother. Despite its lack of beauty, its contents betray its unique and poignant intent: the map shows Hillsborough, NC, as it might have appeared in 1839, when Priscilla Bailey was a young wife and mother, surrounded by friends and social activities. Decades later, when Priscilla was living far from all that and recovering from a bad fall, her son created his map, with its narrative explanation of every detail, to comfort his mother by reminding her of happier days and treasured connections. Why did Bailey - a lawyer with no particular expertise in drafting, surveying, or drawing - decide to make a map to stir healing memories in his mother? The answer may lie in an evocative cartographic culture among elite Southern women of her generation. Educated to use maps, engaged daily with graphic information in their sewing and needlework patterns, and frequently separated from kin and other loved ones, these women turned to the cartographic form with familiarity and an expectation of solace. They used geographic vocabularies and metaphors to express their sense of isolation and their need for connection, even as gender norms and physical realities limited their travel and restricted them to their homes. In this article, the practice and implications of this emotional cartographic culture are explored through the examples of two women, Priscilla Bailey and Ellen Mordecai; this exploration is intended to demonstrate the value of a manuscript-based, biographical approach to the history of domestic map use.

Planning conflicts and social proximity: a reassessment

The term "proximity" has long been absent from the geographical vocabulary. This term is currently re-emerging among researchers in social geography who are questioning the relationship between spatial and social proximity. This paper analyses how a conflict linked to a planning project can generate social proximity, notably by evaluating the conditions in which spatial proximity can bring together the participants opposed to the project. This analysis aims at re-assessing the correlation between social and spatial proximities. It gives evidence that, when the conflict occurs, it generates social proximity between the individuals sharing a common aim and that spatial proximity participates in the process as a necessary condition, but not sufficient enough, for its development

Trips on trains, boats and planes

Travelling provides different experiences, views and vistas and allows children to begin to develop as geographers and to develop their spatial awareness, their sense of direction, their knowledge of appropriate geographical vocabulary and their early mapping skills.

White Mythologies and Anemic Geographies: A Review

Robert Young's book White Mythologies raises some critical questions of importance to geography, Amongst these are the significant links between the critique of Western historicism and the increasing use of spatial names and metaphors in arguments about cultural politics. Young's sweeping criticisms of Marxism are powerful, but they loose sight of the value of work which attends to politico-economic processes while problematising the limits of marxism's meta-narrative. Young's writing is limited itself. It introduces work that breaks with Westem-centrism, but, as it does so, it sometimes falls prey to a form of ‘new’ Orientalism that manipulates and represents such work in the interests of ‘the West’, These limits to the book provide an example of anemic geography. This reified and reifying geography fails to deal adequately with the questions of geographical complexity opened up by the displacement of Western History. Instead, it clokes them beneath the use of a geographical vocabulary employed as a vehicle in the metaphorisation of political debate. Alternatives are possible.