Geographical Terminology Research Articles

GEOGRAPHICAL TOPONYMIC LEXICON OF THE MOKSHA-MORDOVIAN POPULATION OF STARAYA BINARADKA VILLAGE, SAMARA REGION

The article deals with the analysis of the geographical toponymic lexicon existing among the Moksha-Mordovian population of the village of Staraya Binaradka in the Krasnoyarsk district of the Samara region. The Moksha-Mordovia geographical toponymic lexicon is characterized by a significant variety even in the dialects of neighboring settlements. It is shown that the formation of a geographical cluster of toponymic vocabulary in the dialects of the Moksha-Mordovian language is primarily influenced by the following factors: local phonetic, morphological and accentual features of the dialect; the historical and modern ethno-linguistic environment of the carriers of the studied dialect; natural and geographical conditions of the environment of the territory of residence of the carriers of the studied dialect. The article presents the results of a comparative analysis of the starobinaradsky geographical terminology area close to the Moksha-Mordvin dialects. Special attention is paid to the bakhilovsky dialect of the Moksha-Mordovian language, as it is known from archival materials that a significant part of the Mordovian population of the Staraya Binaradka was made up of immigrants from the village of Bakhilovo on the left Bank of the Volga river in the first half of the 18th century. The novelty of the research consists in the fact that up to the present time, the geographical toponymy vocabulary of the starobinskoe dialect of the Moksha-Mordvin language has not been introduced into the scientific circulation and has not been analyzed in the context of toponymic research. The study is based on field materials of the author.

Imagining and mapping the end of an empire: Oskar Spate and the partition of India and Pakistan

In July 1947, the British government of India convened two boundary commissions for the purpose of partitioning the colony into two independent nation states: India and Pakistan. Despite the volume of scholarly work on partition, little attention has been paid to its geographies. This paper addresses this lacuna in two ways: first, by inserting a geographical account into wider historiographical narratives of partition through cartographic-visual analysis and the application of geographical literature. Second, by bringing some of the themes and theoretical contributions from literature on partition into a geographical framework by highlighting the ways in which technical geographical terminology and boundary making practices were used for the political purpose of claiming territory. The paper pursues both of these aims through a biographical approach, examining in detail the unexamined papers of the British geographer Oskar Spate and his minor yet revealing involvement in the Punjab Boundary Commission hearings of July 1947. The paper argues that a territorial divide was unable to resolve the tensions that lay at the heart of the process of partition. This was not simply because geographical expertise was disregarded, but because geographical knowledge and analysis could not provide an adequate solution to the problem of overlapping yet ideologically distinct imagined territorial homelands. The paper thus points to the varied and ambiguous role that maps and mapping played in post-war sites and projects of decolonisation.

Toponymics of the сultural landscape of Yakutia: textualization issues

The article considers the problem of textualization of the toponymic space of Yakutia on the basis of the analysis of the field material collected with the support of the Russian Science Foundation (project no. 15-18-20047). It has revealed that the consideration of the cultural landscape of Yakutia as text associated with the secondary meaning of toponymy. The main distinguishing feature of toponymics of Yakutia is the predominance of geological, geomorphological, natural semantics in the local toponymy. Toponyms of Yakutia associated with permafrost have no analogues and were included in Russian geographical terminology. As part of the cultural landscape, toponymics represents one of its semantic layers. The cultural and semiotic approaches are used to identify the features and patterns of the toponymic text existence in the study area.

GIR'18 Workshop Report 12th ACM SIGSPATIAL workshop on geographic information retrieval seattle, USA 6 th November 2018

Geographic Information Retrieval (GIR) addresses challenges of gaining access to documents and their content that relate to geographical locations. The field can be regarded as a fusion of Information Retrieval (IR), which is concerned with information in unstructured documents and associated methods of natural language processing, with Geographical Information Systems, which are oriented to structured data, and to a range of spatial analytical and data access methods that are relevant to GIR. This workshop is the twelfth of a series of workshops, the first of which was held in 2004. The topics covered by the workshops have have included methods for recognising and disambiguating references to place names in text (referred to as geo-parsing); determining the geographic scope of documents; developing gazetteers and ontologies to maintain knowledge of toponyms and geographic concepts; spatio-textual indexing methods that combine inverted file methods with those of spatial database indexing; managing vagueness and uncertainty in geographic terminology; extracting geo-spatial facts and events from documents; and evaluating the performance of geo-information retrieval systems.

Специфіка значень народних географічних термінів на позначення лугу в українських східнослобожанських говірках Луганщини

Clear that in the folk speech there is no clear distinction between tokens on those that reflect the concept of „floodplain meadows”, or those that are called „land meadows”. The disparity in the name of such formations for speakers is often acquired by external signs of geographic terms, and not by its origin or scientific classification. Therefore, for educated semantic series to designate alkali, we took into account the following relevant features: 1) meadow (general meaning); 2) economic use of meadows; 3) meadow vegetation. Such popular geographic terminology of the Easte Slobozhansky dialects of Lugansk region has not yet been the subject of special study. The article describes the national geographic terms for naming the meadows, their semantic, etymological, word-formation analysis, their features are revealed in the dialects of the Lugansk region in comparison with the Ukrainian literary language and its dialects. The presented dialectal material allows us to study the area of speech contact, to find out the peculiarities of the development of semantics. This contributes to deepening the theory of describing the semantics of the dialectal word and the semantics of specific names in the general linguistic aspect.

Materials to the Dictionary of Pishchanyi Brid Village Dialect (Dobrovelychkivka District, Kirovograd Region): Letter F

Although in recent years, researchers in Ukrainian dialectology have become increasingly interested in the description of dialect lexicon as a dictionary entry, it still lacks systemic consideration. First and foremost, it concerns a theoretical basis for compiling this type of dialect dictionaries, unifying the description and stratigraphy of lexicographic works.
 The purpose of the article is to present modern speaking lexicon of one village residents and do it as fully as possible. The dialects of the Central Ukrainian region, in particular dialects of the Kirovograd region, are researched insufficiently. An exception is our studies of the geographical vocabulary of Central Ukraine and the monography Semantic Features of Folk Geographical Terminology in the Ukrainian Language. The abovementioned determines the topicality of the issue.
 The study analyzes a fragment of the dialect lexicon of the village of Pishchanyi Brid of the Dobrovelychkivskyi district residents (Kirovograd region, Central Ukraine) in terms of modern approaches to the lexicographic processing of the vocabulary. Each dictionary entry is illustrated with the maximum number of the recorded examples, examples of quotations from spoken dialect, especially those lexical units which differ from their equivalents in literary language. The dialect dictionary entry opens with a headword in bold placed at the beginning of an entry. After the word, in square brackets, transcription with the obligatory stress indicator and other phonetic features of the lexeme is provided.
 The article is an attempt to introduce dialect words into the scientific discourse, starting with the letter F. The author of the article, who comes from Pishchanyi Brid, has begun to record the materials in the text file for the initiated dictionary since 1990. This is, in her words, an attempt to “create a dialectical picture of her village”.

On the translation-proper of toponyms in Romanian translations at the beginning of the 19th century

The translation of certain toponyms that had not yet been assimilated to the Romanian language at the beginning of the 19th century represented a real challenge for translators at that time. A first aspect to be considered here is the linguistic status as proper names and the possible translation options that could not be correlated to any tradition. A second aspect is the precarious stage of Romanian geographical terminology, reflected by the terminological variation for the same concept and the lack of semantic affinity, either real or related to the actual terminology. This article addresses mainly the first aspect mentioned above. The issues addressed are as follows: a concise presentation of the concept of proper names translation, the distinction between untranslatable and translatable or partially translatable proper names, the factors motivating the option of translating or not the translatable terms from a toponymic collocation. Our corpus reflects the incipient stage of the translation of translatable or partially translatable toponyms in Romanian, a stage in which the translator is free to decide upon translatability. Compared to the actual norm, the different choices from one translator to another or even those opted for by the same translator—especially the option of not translating toponyms that are nowadays translated in most languages—reveal the lack of importance of linguistic meaning (that is the lexical meaning of the etymon) of the proper name as far as its functioning was concerned, as well as the role of this non-functionality in identifying the linguistic status of a proper name.

The Enigma of “Enterprise Farming”: Towards Reconsidering Geographic Terminology

The Enigma of “Enterprise Farming”: Towards Reconsidering Geographic Terminology

Zhytomyr Region Specific Polysemantic Geographical Terms Used for Identifying 'Places of Getting Hold of Materials for Household Chores'

Collection, study, and classification of the vernacular geographic terms recorded as heard from speakers in certain locality still remain among substantial lines of the onomastic research in Ukraine. For this purpose, the field of material welfare being of the most actuality for people has been selected as description object. Connected therewith geographic terms have embodied and perpetuated in themselves lexemes inherent to different chronological periods. Geographic definitions were and still remain one of the top priority subjects of research pursued by both domestic and foreign scientists. Despite the significant number of researches done with a view to study of Zhytomyr Region specific geographic terms (T. Marusenko, P. Lysenko, and M. Nykonchouk), no special research has been pursued with regard to the Middle-Polissian geographic appellatives identifying Places of getting hold of materials for household chores used within the territory of Zhytomyr Region. No system description of the said nomina is available.
 Used definition Polysemantic geographic terms provides evidence of that not only area, where nomina under assessment are spread, but also used and localized in whatever other meaning is taken into account. It is proposed in the article to classify collected geographic terms with respect to the naming of the geographic realities. Zhytomyr Region specific geographic nomenclature for identifying Places of getting hold of materials for household chores was for the first time given as the integral system together with the structural and semantic description of the lexis used. The most widely and little-used, as well as sporadic terms were separated. Zhytomyr Region specific dialects are known for the mixed character of pronunciation that is manifested through the use of a number of phonetic forms of the same lexeme. These ones may exist in parallel within the same populated locality or be opposite to subdialect zones.
 Obtained results may be used for characterization of Zhytomyr Region specific subdialects, study of the inter-subdialect interaction, as well as compiling of the Geographic Terminology Dictionary of Ukraine.

An Approach to Measuring Semantic Relatedness of Geographic Terminologies Using a Thesaurus and Lexical Database Sources

In geographic information science, semantic relatedness is important for Geographic Information Retrieval (GIR), Linked Geospatial Data, geoparsing, and geo-semantics. But computing the semantic similarity/relatedness of geographic terminology is still an urgent issue to tackle. The thesaurus is a ubiquitous and sophisticated knowledge representation tool existing in various domains. In this article, we combined the generic lexical database (WordNet or HowNet) with the Thesaurus for Geographic Science and proposed a thesaurus–lexical relatedness measure (TLRM) to compute the semantic relatedness of geographic terminology. This measure quantified the relationship between terminologies, interlinked the discrete term trees by using the generic lexical database, and realized the semantic relatedness computation of any two terminologies in the thesaurus. The TLRM was evaluated on a new relatedness baseline, namely, the Geo-Terminology Relatedness Dataset (GTRD) which was built by us, and the TLRM obtained a relatively high cognitive plausibility. Finally, we applied the TLRM on a geospatial data sharing portal to support data retrieval. The application results of the 30 most frequently used queries of the portal demonstrated that using TLRM could improve the recall of geospatial data retrieval in most situations and rank the retrieval results by the matching scores between the query of users and the geospatial dataset.

Номінація рельєфу в діалектних текстах Черкащини

The present paper deals with the analysis of folk geographic terminology. Since the Middle Dniper dialects is the basic component of the Ukrainianliterary language, the purpose of the article is to observe phenomena that are different from the literary standard. The source base is dialectal textsof Cherkasy region. Recently Ukrainian dialect textography has been enriched with new works from different territories of Ukraine. Such form ofinformation recording allows to research all language levels, to determine linguistic phenomena in their natural interactions and to reveal the specificity of dialect speakers’ world perception. This factor is important for the study of ramified and complex semantics of nominative unites that name the geographical objects. The research shows that the range of lexemes denoted separate notions is wider in the dialect speakers’ speech than in the literary language. This contributes to the expansion of the semantics, the formation of synonymic sets within a single dialect and interdialecte quivalents in the studied dialect continuum. Such conclusions indicate that lexemes register of literary language dictionary is significantly limited and our research is relevant and perspective.

Surveillance and Spies in the Civil War: Exposing Confederate Conspiracies in America’s Heartland by Stephen E. Towne

Reviewed by: Surveillance and Spies in the Civil War: Exposing Confederate Conspiracies in America’s Heartland by Stephen E. Towne Kelly Mezurek Surveillance and Spies in the Civil War: Exposing Confederate Conspiracies in America’s Heartland. By Stephen E. Towne. (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2015. 430 pp. Paper $34.95, isbn 978-0-8214-2103-1.) Stephen E. Towne, in Surveillance and Spies in the Civil War: Exposing Confederate Conspiracies in America’s Heartland, reassesses the role of military intelligence on the Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois home front. In doing so, he challenges the assertions made by Frank L. Klement and other historians that the opposition to the Union war effort in those areas posed no real threat, and that any claims otherwise were concocted for and by Republicans in order to maintain political control. Towne convincingly shows otherwise. He also helps move the discussion of Civil War military surveillance beyond the battlefield to southern regions under Union occupation, and the more “thrilling” exploits of amateur spies. As a result, Surveillance and Spies in the Civil War demonstrates the “widespread reach of the army’s espionage efforts during the war” (3). Towne argues that many in the lower Midwest believed that “upheaval and violence were close to the surface” (6). Citizens, angered by conscription, organized secret political groups with connections to the Democratic Party that assisted deserters, encouraged men to avoid the draft, plotted prison escapes to free Confederate captives, and “threatened large-scale unrest” (6). State officials, who lacked the number of soldiers necessary to put down any significant challenges, failed to adequately squash the growing threats to the Union war effort. As a result, military leaders took control and implemented widespread surveillance. Although haphazard at times and without direct supervision from the federal government, the army worked with state provost marshals to spy on citizens and politicians suspected of membership in, or having support for, these secret groups. They used military officers and soldiers, hired detectives, and enlisted civilian informants whom they placed at recruiting stations, rendezvous camps, prisons, and draft offices to gather intelligence. They also examined private telegraphs and written correspondence. As a result, several plots were thwarted, conspirators were arrested, and some were tried. Towne attributes the overall failure of groups such as the Sons of Liberty, first called the Knights of the Golden Circle and later the Order of American Knights, to these wide-reaching espionage practices. The author, an archivist at Indiana University–Purdue University Indianapolis, utilizes to the full extent state archival material that few have used so closely before, and along with newspapers and federal records provides an abundance of evidence for the wartime threats and responses to them by the military and state officials. [End Page 91] He convincingly portrays Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, and areas around the state borders as a region that faced more serious challenges than those posed by Clement L. Vallandigham and his Copperhead followers. Towne claims the actions used to foil these challenges serve as a precedent for later government surveillance, but his analysis of these events ends in 1865. One area missing from an otherwise thorough analysis of the wartime reactions to the Enrollment Act and the draft is a closer examination of issues related to race, particularly the Emancipation Proclamation, the Union Army’s use of black soldiers, and the Democrats’ insistence that former slaves would cross the Ohio River in droves and wreak havoc on wages and move into northern communities. Despite Towne’s characterization of Lincoln’s decree as having “a stunning effect on politics in the North” (46), there is little discussion of how groups and individuals who sought to disrupt the federal and state war efforts used—or did not use—the issues related to African Americans to garner support, or if they had any impact on attempts at surveillance. Also, at times the geographic terminology used when referencing Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois can be confusing; Old Northwest, Midwest, Northwestern, and lower Midwestern are not necessarily interchangeable. Overall, though, Towne has produced a well-researched monograph that provides a much-needed reexamination of military intelligence during the Civil War in Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois. His work demonstrates the value of...

Memoryscapes of the Great War (1914-1918): A paradigm shift in tourism research on war heritage

Research on the process of tourismification of former war sites and landscapes is by definition interdisciplinary. The challenge is to introduce new concepts to link past and present, heritage sites and memorial events, in time and place, to critically reflect on the content and trendy use of vaguely defined “scape” concepts in relation to heritage. The need to anchor heritagescapes in time and space, explains the association with geographical terminology and spatial references at different scales. The question arises on how to identify the vectors of change induced by tourism to historical war sites. The added value of an international online survey completed by the World Heritage Tourism Research Network1 (WHTRN) in 2012 results from both the conceptual and interdisciplinary approach, questioning the interdependency of cultural, social, economic and political processes within the context of war memoryscapes, and the empirical data resulting from this multilingual survey.New tourism landscapes emerge in which the interests of national and regional governments, local and global stakeholders play an important role. Geographically balanced and comparative research is required to better understand the complex relationship of the 21st-century nations and people with the tangible and intangible war heritage of the previous century. Since tourism has become an important partner and stakeholder in the process of revalorizing the past, the focus is on the current practices of selecting and (re) creating memoryscapes of the Great War (1914-1918). Strongly based on remembrance, narratives and multiple images of the war, evoked by the centennial ‘hype’ in events and media attention, numerous places with tangible and/or reconstructed war heritage are now marked on the tourist map. The inclusion in the survey of a number of open questions regarding values, experiences, memories from over 2,400 respondents (61 countries) resulted in a huge database, which allows the identification of some relevant variables in the ongoing tourismification process of former war landscapes. This paper focuses on selected issues and results stemming from the survey.

A boat perspective: local geographic knowledge of fish harvesters in Change Islands, Newfoundland

People whose livelihoods depend on the natural environment have detailed knowledge of the lands and waters surrounding their communities. This paper presents research on the traditional geographic knowledge of fish harvesters in Change Islands, Newfoundland. Our findings, based on “kitchen table mapping” and other ethnographic methods, demonstrate that residents of coastal communities have extensive geographic knowledge associated with a way of life centred on fishing. This knowledge is reflected in a “namescape” that includes hundreds of toponyms that are not present on existing maps and that reflect meaningful connections with local history and cultural heritage. Fish harvesters also have distinctive ways of conceptualizing the landscape and the seascape, which is reflected in the geographic terminology they use. Overall, their way of looking at the environment, in contrast to the bird's-eye perspective that prevails in western cartography, can be characterized as a “boat perspective”. Their geographic knowledge has practical value for improving existing cartographic information and developing sustainable resource use strategies. At a broader level, their distinctive ways of interpreting the “earthscape” provide alternative ways of understanding space and place, and can help us identify our assumptions about how we define geographic features and represent them on maps.

Procesy przekładu i metody translacyjne na materiale czeskim i polskim – ekwiwalencja realiów biblijnych

The Processes and Methods of Czech and Polish Translation – the Equivalence of Biblical Realities In this article the Author focuses on issues related to the widely understood process of translation. The subject of the analysis are mainly Czech and Polish biblical verses which use proper names (geographical terminology and executive functions performed). At this point, the Author analyses cultural elements - perceived as figure translation – that is the way they were transferred from the source text to the target text. During the process of translation one may observe the phenomenon associated with both foreignization and domestication (depending on the kind of translation). One is also dealing with a mirror image of the original text, widely understood linguistic adaptation and conversion, direct transfer, definitional development, the so-called metatranslational mistakes consisting in reducing the cultural element or functional equivalence translation. The translated biblical realities narrowed down to, for example, geographical names, means of payment or executive functions performed may be connected with cognitive models, sometimes giving them different terminology, which could be culturally conditioned.

What Is Media Archaeology? Jussi Parikka.

The title of Jussi Parikka’s most recent work on new media asks a question whose answer should provide insight into some of the most dynamic scholarly trends in cultural studies, media studies, and history today. What Is Media Archaeology? provides a wide-ranging overview of the amorphous ‘field’ of media archeology, a subject that Parikka points out covers a shifting terrain of trans-disciplinary methods and subject areas. Employing this geographic terminology, Parikka calls his work a ‘cartography’ of media archeology and attempts to map a number of intersecting arenas of theory and practice. Although the book occasionally threatens to overwhelm its ostensible subject by annexing a number of adjacent subject areas, it should provide a solid grounding in contemporary debates for researchers, teachers, and students. Parikka’s interest in media archeology lies not only in uncovering past technologies and ‘old new media’ for their own sake but also more generally in using such work to reflect on contemporary ‘digital culture’. His goal, he writes, is both to outline current debates in media studies and to propose new directions for media archeological research. The book ends up focusing more on the former goal, while the author’s own proposals emerge in a somewhat elliptical fashion. Parikka returns frequently to two guiding theoretical directions: Michel Foucault’s work on archives as systems of power that structure what can be known and stored and Friedrich Kittler’s discussion of ‘discourse networks’ and call for media-specific investigation. Although Parikka offers separate chapters on, for example, new media archives and German media theory, references to these two theorists recur throughout the book. Chapter 1 introduces What Is Media Archaeology? by identifying four key areas in which the field has emerged: inquiries into modernity, film studies, histories of the present, and alternative histories. Parikka identifies the power of media archeology as a ‘spirit of thinking the new and the old in parallel lines’ (p. 2)—a methodology that results in a view of media history that is not linear or teleological but, rather, layered and sedimented.

Transgender Men: A Demographic Snapshot

ABSTRACT Male-to-female transgender men are frequently underrepresented in research on transgender issues. This article presents the results of a study examining the demographics of transgender men in the United States and Canada between September and October 2005. Three hundred and twenty-one self-identified transgender men responded to an online survey inquiring about geographic locale, employment, gender terminology, support services, significant relationships, and transition status. Results indicate that a majority were under 35, employed full or part time, and had at least some college or graduate school education. Most men had not experienced service refusal, homelessness, or lack of relational support systems.

In this country, in these countries?

The subhead of this essay could be "Comparative regional-geographical wander around France and Czech countries". The authors points out that in Czech geographical terminology the term country is ambiguous. Especially historical countries Bohemia, Moravia and Silesia have always had timeless applicability; on their long-term existence and on their historical symbols are based also the statehood of the Czech Republic and its symbols. Unfortunately, historical countries are not respected in any way by the territorial administrative division, although their size (NUTS 1) is suitable also for the NUTS system. In this connection, the author compares the situation in Czechia to that in France, where long-term regional division was not much backed as well, but where the situation is now in general consolidated and the new level of French regions (after the reform of the 1960's to 1980's) has stimulated many of the historical regions. The author deals also with the extensive present French regional geographical literature and tries to indirectly inspire also Czech authors.

GIR'05 2005 ACM workshop on geographical information retrieval

Geographical information retrieval (GIR) is concerned with the problems of finding information resources that relate to particular geographical locations. Until recently most web search engines have treated geographical terminology within user queries in the same way as other terminology. This can often result in failure to find relevant documents and in the retrieval of irrelevant documents. There are several reasons for this. For example, there are many different places with the same name, so unless the query contains a unique set of geographical terms, documents referring to the wrong place may be retrieved. There are many uses of place names in the names of people and organisations with the consequence that search depending on naive exact matching of terms may retrieve such documents even though they may not relate to the named place. It is also the case that queries may include spatial prepositions, such as near or outside, which will not be interpreted intelligently by the search engine. Thus relevant documents may not be found because the user's query did not contain explicit references to the places that match the query expression, in the sense of being, for example, near, inside or north of a named place. It is also the case that conventional search engines lack other desirable facilities for geographical search such as relevance ranking that takes account of geographical proximity and the ability to use interactive maps to specify a query and to visualise the results.

“From the Upper Sea to the Lower Sea”

Seas and lakes (Akkadian tâmtu) located in the surrounds of Mesopotamia, which the Assyrians encountered in their military campaigns, are mentioned in Assyrian royal inscriptions under various names. These sea names were used not only for indicating specific geographical entities, but also for expressing political ideas relating to the extent of the Assyrian dominion. Many of the terminological components such as “upper” or “of the sunset” were used at different times to refer to different bodies of water over the course of time. The rich variety in the appellations of seas attested in the Assyrian royal inscriptions from different times essentially originated in scribal efforts to renovate the use of geographical terminology. The terminological development clearly reflects the changes in the interests of Assyrian rulers in the seas over the course o f time.