English Place Names Research Articles

Custom Anchorless Object Detection Model for 3D Synthetic Traffic Sign Board Dataset with Depth Estimation and Text Character Extraction

This paper introduces an anchorless deep learning model designed for efficient analysis and processing of large-scale 3D synthetic traffic sign board datasets. With an ever-increasing emphasis on autonomous driving systems and their reliance on precise environmental perception, the ability to accurately interpret traffic sign information is crucial. Our model seamlessly integrates object detection, depth estimation, deformable parts, and text character extraction functionalities, facilitating a comprehensive understanding of road signs in simulated environments that mimic the real world. The dataset used has a large number of artificially generated traffic signs for 183 different classes. The signs include place names in Japanese and English, expressway names in Japanese and English, distances and motorway numbers, and direction arrow marks with different lighting, occlusion, viewing angles, camera distortion, day and night cycles, and bad weather like rain, snow, and fog. This was done so that the model could be tested thoroughly in a wide range of difficult conditions. We developed a convolutional neural network with a modified lightweight hourglass backbone using depthwise spatial and pointwise convolutions, along with spatial and channel attention modules that produce resilient feature maps. We conducted experiments to benchmark our model against the baseline model, showing improved accuracy and efficiency in both depth estimation and text extraction tasks, crucial for real-time applications in autonomous navigation systems. With its model efficiency and partwise decoded predictions, along with Optical Character Recognition (OCR), our approach suggests its potential as a valuable tool for developers of Advanced Driver-Assistance Systems (ADAS), Autonomous Vehicle (AV) technologies, and transportation safety applications, ensuring reliable navigation solutions.

REVIEW OF THE TEXTBOOK Borys Dmytro (2022). Onomastic aspects of translation: theory and practice. Onomastic aspects of translation: theory and practice. - Kyiv: KNLU Publishing Center, 2022 - 108 p.)

Strengthening the position of the Ukrainian state in the international arena, recognition of its role in maintaining global security and stability, deepening its integration into the Euro-Atlantic and world community raises to a new level the need to train highly qualified specialist translators, whose professional competencies would meet the requirements of modernity and the growing needs of our country. In the short term, due to the involvement of foreign governments, international organizations and private companies in the post-war reconstruction of Ukraine, the number of our international contacts at at all levels will increase rapidly. This means that that future specialists will not only have to search for and correctly use common equivalents of English place names, atroponyms, ergonyms, but also often reproduce them themselves, or rather create Ukrainian equivalents for specific English-language cultural realities, and vice versa. Thus, the expansion of international cooperation in economic, political, military, security cultural, educational, environmental and many other spheres of life, necessitates the creation of new modern textbooks and translation manuals. Such is the peer-reviewed textbook by D. P. Borys "Onomastic Aspects of Translation: Theory and Practice".

Guadalupe or Guadaloop?

To examine the social evaluations of place-name variation, a matched-guise study was created using audio clips of four bilingual and four monolingual Austinites performing a map task. The audio clips were digitally manipulated to vary only in place-name pronunciation, using English or Spanish phonology for Spanish place-names and established local or newcomer nonlocal for English place-names. Based on the responses of 126 residents of Austin, mixed-effects linear regression models and qualitative comments found that listeners uniformly perceived English place-name variation only in terms of localness, while Spanish variation indexed several social meanings that varied by listener and speaker demographics, particularly listener ethnicity (i.e., non-Hispanic listeners evaluated Spanish phonology as nonlocal while Hispanic listeners considered both English and Spanish phonology local). The author contends that (1) not all listeners perceive the same indexical fields but rather partially overlapping fields; (2) differing perceptions of Spanish place-names reveal underlying monoglossic ideologies in the United States; and (3) place-name variation is a rich site of indexical information for the construction of place identity, particularly in bilingual regions.

Is 'London' English? A Stochastic Analysis of English Place Names

Is 'London' English? A Stochastic Analysis of English Place Names

Palatalization and assibilation of /k/ in English and Scottish place-names

AbstractThere are very few place-names with initialCh-[tʃ-] in Scotland, Northern England and much of the East Midlands. Names that do exist are almost exclusively late formations and usually consist of French rather than Old English place-name elements. This article investigates the reasons why assibilation is either present or absent from specific areas and why. The results lead to a reassessment of several points, including: (1) the phonetic and phonological development of the voiceless velar in Early English in particular environments; (2) the extent to which external influence counteracted palatalization and assibilation in some areas; (3) the disparities between the place-name and dialectal evidence.

O izgovarjavi angleških zemljepisnih imen v slovenščini

The article focuses on the pronunciation of English place names that appear in Slovenian in a (semi-)citation form. By using reference manuals (Slovenski pravopis and Govorni pomočnik) and analysing language use (audio/video recordings of the national broadcaster and the corpus of spoken Slovenian, GOS), we examine the extent to which Slovenian speakers follow the prescribed Slovenian pronunciation of English place names. An analysis of the data shows that there are occasional discrepancies between the norm and language use, which stem from incorrect transphonemisation, the influence of the English spelling of words, and incorrect analogies.

「河畔の低地草地」に由来するイングランドの地名:気候地名との関連をさぐるための基盤研究

「河畔の低地草地」に由来するイングランドの地名:気候地名との関連をさぐるための基盤研究

古英語hamm に由来するイングランドの地名:分布と拡大の推移

古英語hamm に由来するイングランドの地名:分布と拡大の推移

Effectiveness of Teaching Place Names in English to Students with Intellectual Disabilities through Antecedent Prompt and Test Procedure

This study explored the effectiveness of teaching place names in English to students with intellectual disabilities by utilizing antecedent prompt and test procedure. Three subjects with mild intellectual disability participated in the study. Multiple probe design, which is a single subject research model, was used in the study to determine the effectiveness of antecedent prompt and test procedure in teaching place names in English to the subjects. Research findings demonstrated that antecedent prompt and test procedure was effective in teaching the target behaviors to the three subjects. Students were found to maintain the target behaviors with high accuracy in the 19 th and 29 th days after teaching. Two subjects generalized the target behaviors to individuals, settings and instruments at a rate of 96% while this rate was found to be 87% for the other subject. The study concludes with the limitations of the study and suggestions for future studies.

English Place-Names Containing Old English cōl Followed by Landscape Features Other Than Water Features

English Place-Names Containing Old English cōl Followed by Landscape Features Other Than Water Features

Cheshire’s Celtic Place-Names

Cheshire, settled by Anglo-Saxons in the later seventh century, has many placenames of British origin, as well as Irish place-names given by tenth-century migrants from Ireland. Twenty-seven real or supposed instances are discussed here: Arclid, Antrobus, Arrow, Bollin, Brynn, Cilgwri, Crewe, Dane, Dee, Eccleston, Goyt, Ince, Landican, Liscard, Lostock, Lyme, Mellor, Mottram, Noctorum, Peover, Rhedynfre, Tarvin, Tintwistle, Tybrunawt/Tybrunawg, Weaver, Werneth, Wheelock. Ten of them are provided with derivations at variance with The Cambridge Dictionary of English Place-Names and other handbooks. Also discussed are three Welsh forms (Cilgwri, Rhedynfre, Tybrunawt/Tybrunawg) sometimes related to Cheshire. Although the second is certainly Farndon in the county’s south-west, the first and third have no Cheshire link. Cilgwri may be identified as a place near Corwen, Denbighshire. Tybrunawt/Tybrunawg or ‘Brunian House, House on (the River) Browney’, a book-name for the location of the Battle of Brunanburh in 937, should be identified with the Roman fortress of Lanchester above the River Brune or Browney, Co. Durham. Hence Brunanburh means ‘fortress of the Browney’. Other historical information is provided by Arclid, apparently the Arecluta where the British-Latin writer Gildas was born in 493. Analysis of toponyms thus provides new data on Cheshire’s past, while refuting earlier theories.

Driving simulator study of the comparative effectiveness of monolingual and bilingual guide signs on Chinese highways

As China has become more attractive for foreigners to travel or work, some Chinese-English bilingual guide signs have been adopted on the highways for the convenience of foreign drivers. This research examined the effectiveness of Chinese-English bilingual guide signs on highways in China for drivers with different language backgrounds. The study involved three different groups of participants: Chinese (Group C), foreigners who passed the Chinese proficiency test HSK (Group FC), and foreigners without Chinese proficiency test (Group F). A driving simulator and an eye tracker were used to obtain eye movement and driving behaviour data for both monolingual and bilingual guide sign scenes. The results showed that, for Groups C and FC, their performance in the two scenes had little difference when the number of Chinese place (destination) names on the sign was 5 or less. However, the performance of Groups C and FC in the bilingual guide sign scene was worse than that in the Chinese guide sign scene when the number of place names exceeded 5. Moreover, the participants’ performance worsened as the number of place names increased for all different groups within the same scene. Thus, the threshold of the number of place names for bilingual guide signs on highways appears to be 5. Actually, the English place names on the bilingual guide signs did not have much practical effect on the drivers, since the letters of the place names were too small to be quickly seen and the translation was inaccurate.

Locating Past Places in Britain: Creating and Evaluating the GB1900 Gazetteer

The GB1900 project used crowd-sourcing to transcribe all text from the second edition County Series six inch to one mile maps of Great Britain, published between 1888 and 1914, a total of c. 2.55m. geo-located text strings. These locate almost every farm and about half of all street names. The paper describes the final datasets, and how they were created. It then presents a detailed comparison with five other freely-available gazetteers of Britain: Geonames, the US government's NGA gazetteer, the Ordnance Survey's 50k and Open Names datasets, and the English Place Name Survey's DEEP project. Comparisons are presented at national level and, more qualitatively, for an area of eastern England. The results demonstrate both GB1900's greater volume of geo-located entries and its ability to locate places and features identified in other historical sources beyond administrative hierarchies: this is the most detailed historical gazetteer, certainly for Britain and possibly for anywhere. The final online system is described, including its integration of place name histories from DEEP.

An OT Analysis of Chinese Transliterations of English Place Names

This paper focuses on the analysis of the Chinese transliterations of English place names in the Optimality Theory (OT) [1]. Three groups of monosyllabic, disyllabic and multisyllabic English place names are analyzed to represent the hierarchical ranking of both Markedness and Faithfulness constraints in terms of sound epenthesis, which is one of the most important repair strategies named the Preservation Principle [2] devised to “preserve” every source segment (or sound) of the target place names. By doing so, this paper tries to answer the question of why sound epenthesis takes place in transliterating words between languages. With the help of the established ranking of the relevant constraints, this paper explains the process of sound epenthesis formally.

The Frequency Effect and Phonological Productivity in English Place-Names ending in -wick

The Frequency Effect and Phonological Productivity in English Place-Names ending in -wick

The Linguistic Past in Twelfth-Century Britain by Sara Harris

Reviewed by: The Linguistic Past in Twelfth-Century Britain by Sara Harris Scott Gwara sara harris, The Linguistic Past in Twelfth-Century Britain. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017. Pp. 292. isbn: 978–1–107–18005–5. $105. In this fine book, Sara Harris has explored the Dark Continent of twelfth-century English historical, literary, and legal writings. Focusing on the incipient awareness of a layered linguistic past—Brittonic giving way to Latin, giving way to Old English (including Norse), giving way to Anglo-Norman—Harris identifies the theoretical means of conveying pastness in etymologies, archaisms, discursive commentary, and outright invention. Engagement with such a linguistic past, she suggests, embraces multi-ethnic ancestral identity, cultural awareness, political authority, and models of conquest. In her introduction, Harris grounds native perceptions of language history in scriptural terms, describing how languages fall away from a pre-lapsarian transparency, disperse worldwide at the Tower of Babel, and then suffer ‘corruption.’ She explains how Latin ultimately provides the grammatical structures for analyzing vernacular tongues. This promising start triggers an avalanche of percipient deductions. Chapter One covers efforts in English monasteries to validate Anglo-Saxon privileges through documents incorporating Old English, either in the original or in translation. Norman encroachments on pre-Conquest monastic possessions explain why vernaculars were thought to convey authenticity. Ramsey Abbey apparently translated authentic grants. Bury St. Edmunds, by contrast, concocted forgeries, as did St. Albans. Its charters [End Page 80] (one uses the term advisedly) underpinned the lost Gesta abbatum monasterii Sancti Albani, which survives in the Liber additamentorum of Matthew Paris. The Gesta was allegedly translated from a Romano-British book found in a wall at the abbey. The manuscript disintegrated after being translated. Æðelwold of Winchester also found an ancient source in a wall at Peterborough, presumably a version of the Relatio Hedde abbatis, which verifies the founding of Peterborough in 654–55. Chapter Two concerns the prestige of Old English texts in the twelfth century. Henry of Huntingdon is shown to have had a solid, but imperfect, knowledge of Old English. He usually translated sense-for-sense but could also produce more granular renderings. Reflecting on Henry’s appreciation for linguistic mutability, Harris illustrates his strategies and failings. His translation of the ‘Battle of Brunanburh’ correctly rendered ‘heardes hondplegan’ as ‘duro manus ludo’ (p. 73), while ‘hamora lafan’ was misconstrued as ‘domesticae reliquiae’ (p. 75), confusing OE hamor (‘hammer’) as OE ham (‘home’). Regardless of the inaccuracies, Henry’s effort acknowledges ‘the authority of ancient documentation’ (p. 78). ‘Brunanburh,’ in fact, highlights the ‘literal meaning and the literary experience of reading’ (p. 75), in which pastness can be re-imagined and re-deployed. Harris finds a similar theoretical statement made by the Eadwine Psalter, a complex, multi-lingual, illustrated manuscript. Its historical ‘accretions’ include artwork drawn from the Utrecht Psalter, a Romanum exemplar of demonstrable antiquity, and Old English glosses from multiple sources, many unknown. Harris interprets this complexity, and especially the English vernacular, as evidence of Canterbury Psalm scholarship established in a co-linguistic context. Writings by Geoffrey of Monmouth are the subject of Chapter Three. In Harris’ view, Geoffrey’s ‘liber vestustissimus,’ the alleged source of Gesta regum Brittaniae, validated Brittonic languages for historical study. The antiquity, content, style, and etymological interest of Welsh rivaled that of English and Anglo-Norman. Geoffrey’s gambit of validating Brittonic sources recalls how Historia Brittonum assimilated Brittonic legend and folktale genres into Latin chronicle history. Endorsing the etymological strategies used for Latin or English place names, Geoffrey legitimized Brittonic writings for an audience of skeptical Normans. Harris concludes, ‘[Geoffrey] endowed the Britons with a much fuller history’ and ‘located the significance of that history in their language’ (p. 97). The success of Geoffrey’s Prophetia Merlini, also advertised as a translation, likewise proved the status of vernacular sources. Commentaries that emerged around the prophecies invited interpretation via a Latin exegetical tradition. Gerald of Wales, finally, employed language to ‘[reconstruct] ethnic history’ (p. 117). In one notable episode from the Itinerarium Kambriae, the Welsh phrase ‘halgerin ydorum’ (‘pass the salt’) evoked the origin of Welsh in the Greek tongue spoken by Trojans. Chapter Four centers on legal language. Just as ‘archaic...

English Place-Names Containing Old English cōl Followed by Water Features

English Place-Names Containing Old English cōl Followed by Water Features

THE ARABIC ORIGINS OF ENGLISH AND EUROPEAN "PLACE NAMES": A CONSONANTAL RADICAL THEORY APPROACH

This paper examines the Arabic origins of some common place names in English, German, French, Latin, Greek, Russian, and Sanskrit from a consonantal radical or lexical root theory perspective. The data consists of the names of around 60 key cities like Birmingham, Brighton, Cambridge, Chester, Derby, Essex, Exeter, Glasgow, London, Manchester, Oxford, Queensville, York, etc. The results clearly show that all such names have true Arabic cognates, with the same or similar forms and meanings whose different forms, however, are all found to be due to natural and plausible causes and different courses of linguistic change. Furthermore, they show that place names play an important role in both near and distant genetic relationships. As a consequence, the results indicate, contrary to Comparative Method and Family-Tree Model claims (e.g. Campbell 2013; Harper 2012-18),� that Arabic, English, and all Indo-European languages� belong to the same language, let alone the same family. Therefore, they prove the adequacy of the consonantal radical theory in relating English, German, French, Latin, and Greek to Arabic as their origin all because, unlike any other language in the group, it shares cognates with all of them in addition to its huge linguistic repertoire phonetically, phonologically, morphologically, syntactically, and semantically.Keywords: Place names, Arabic, English, German, French, Russian, Latin, Greek, Sanskrit, historical linguistics, consonantal radical/lexical root theory

A helynevek rendszere, funkciója és fordíthatósága A tűz és jég dala című fantasyciklusban

The paper examines the place name systems appearing in the novels of the fantasy series A Song of Ice and Fire by George R. R. Martin. Motivation for naming is identified through the analysis of names for large physical features, regions and their seats. A functional-semantic typology including examples is also established, which demonstrates how rich in detail the literary world is and how colourful the adopted names are. The author also discusses the metonymic use of place names and observes the use of names in relation to the events and the world of the novels. Although the analysis is based on the original, English place names, the paper also examines the Hungarian translations of the toponyms focusing on the principles and systematicity of translation strategies. The author presents how successful the translated name forms are in maintaining the semantic and structural features of the original place names.

Erlend nöfn á Innnesjum: Arfur seinni heimsstyrjaldar í örnefnum á höfuðborgarsvæðinu

During the occupation in the Second World War, British and American soldiers in the Greater-Reykjavik area replaced Icelandic place names with English ones which were easier for them to pronounce and read, and they also anglicized some Icelandic names. In the article, these names are described and discussed. The British soldiers mostly used names which they knew from districts in England and Scotland. The US soldiers were, on the other hand, more fond of names of heroes and generals in the US army. The English place names never really gained a foothold in Iceland after the Second World War, and they disappeared in one decade.