Toponyms as Evidence of Linguistic Influence on the British Isles : Diplomski rad (original) (raw)

Rethinking Old English Toponyms

The analysis of English place-names has, for the last ninety years, been framed in post-Enlightenment Cartesian terms. Focusing on place-names formed in Old English, the language of the Anglo-Saxons, three aspects of this approach are challenged here: Cartesian reductionism which has informed how place-names have been grouped and subdivided; Cartesian dualism which has encouraged the idea that resulting categories of place-names are intrinsically different and opposed —especially topographical and habitative names; and Cartesian mapping which has dictated how place-names have been examined in spatial context. While these remain extremely helpful in developing etymologies for particular place-name elements, it is argued that since these names originated in a non-Cartesian world, current approaches create interpretative barriers that hinder a full understanding of the motivation lying behind place-naming and the role that place-names may have played in Anglo-Saxon society. Drawing on examples of indigenous naming practices from across the globe, where it can be shown that place-names are habitually designed to communicate critical aspects of Traditional Ecological Knowledge, a new way forward for English place-name studies is proposed that might operate alongside the existing paradigm.

Interdisciplinary Approach to British Place-names Studies

Procedia - Social and Behavioral Sciences, 2014

Realization of culture, history and geography in the morphological structure of British place-names is observed. New tends of the interdisciplinary approach to place-names system development, the relationship of place-names and vocabulary words, archaic Indo-European roots, universal and ethnic features of place-names are considered in complex with historical and cultural impact.

The Instability of Place-Names in Anglo-Saxon England and Early Medieval Wales, and the Loss of Roman Toponymy

makes its contributions in three main areas, pragmatic, theoretical and historical: * Pragmatic: this is an ‘open source’ paper. Its findings arise from several datasets which are published online, primarily at http://eprints.whiterose.ac.uk/42650, as an integral part of this paper. Readers are invited not only to use these datasets to check Alaric's claims, but to develop them for their own purposes. * Theoretical: we often work on the implicit assumption that place-name survival is random, and therefore unbiased evidence for the time at which the names were coined. This may not be the case, however. In using a number of different, relatively large datasets to sketch how stable place-names were in early medieval England and Wales and in what circumstances, this paper begins to address fundamental sociolinguistic questions about how place-names were coined, accepted, and maintained. * Historical: as a case-study for the historical implications of its theoretical explorations, the paper analyses the early medieval language-shift in eastern Britain from Celtic and Latin to English. A key approach here is to compare English evidence with a region which to a large extent experienced linguistic continuity throughout the first millennium, Wales. Early medieval Wales suggests the degree to which place-names might be unstable despite substantial linguistic continuity. We have little more hard evidence for continuity of names from the Roman period in Wales than in England, and England arguably shows no greater loss of Roman place-names than we should expect in any region of post-Roman Britain.

Celtic Language Elements in the Place Names of Ireland

2020

The article deals with the culture and heritage of ancient Celts by analyzing the toponyms of Celtic origin in the Republic of Ireland, Northern Ireland, as well as in the places where the Irish diaspora is present. In accordance with the set goal, the article considers the cultural component in the meaning of linguistic units and the classifi cation of toponyms and their use in diff erent parts of the island. By the example of the analysis of the meaning of Celtic toponyms functioning in modern Ireland and Northern Ireland, it is shown that Celtic national heritage has not been lost. The study of toponyms allows us to penetrate into the worldview of the ancient people whose culture infl uenced and shaped the descendants of Celts. Key words: Celtic languages, place name, toponymy, Ireland, the Irish language, semantics.

(Mis)Leading Approaches in Toponomastics. Review of the book: Perono Cacciafoco, F., & Cavallaro, F. (2023). Place Names. Approaches and Perspectives in Toponymy and Toponomastics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. xxiii + 298 p.

Voprosy onomastiki, 2023

The paper provides a critical review of a ten-chapter volume dealing with various aspects of the study of place names. Conceived as a concise but comprehensive reference source for students in toponomastics, the book has two distinct focuses, namely historical toponomastics (i.e. the study of place names within the framework of historical linguistics and contact language theory) and social toponomastics, but also covers the study of toponymy in the context of historical geography, language documentation, and cartography. Despite the fact that the book presents a good survey of some topics and contains relevant references to scholarly publications, which may be useful for students, it displays numerous issues in the chapters related to etymology, language change, and historical linguistics, which may give the readers a distorted idea of the research practices normally used in the corresponding sub-fields of toponomastics. In some cases, the analysis proposed in the book lacks arguments and further explanations, while in others, it is simply based on an a priori fallacy.

A toponomastic contribution to the linguistic prehistory of the British Isles

2012

It is well known that some of the major island-names of the archipelago consisting politically of the Republic of Ireland, the United Kingdom, and the UK Crown Dependencies are etymologically obscure. In this paper, I present and cautiously analyse a small set of those which remain unexplained or uncertainly explained. It is timely to do this, since in the disciplines of archaeology and genetics there is an emerging consensus that after the last Ice Age the islands were repopulated mainly by people from a refuge on the Iberian peninsula. This opinion is at least superficially compatible with Theo Vennemann’s Semitidic and Vasconic hypotheses (e.g. Vennemann 1995), i.e. that languages (a) of the Afroasiatic family, and (b) ancestral to Basque, are important contributors to the lexical and onomastic stock of certain European languages. The unexplained or ill-explained island names form a small set, but large enough to make it worthwhile to attempt an analysis of their collective lingu...