A Failure in Translation
This blog post is, essentially, a cautionary tale. It’s about automatically assuming that we understand a word or a concept, rather than questioning our assumptions—even the most basic of these–and then digging deeper to find an “Aha!”. Let me explain this through the place name Ottawa. Ottawa is an important place for a lot of […]
Why do we not know what some places mean?
As I wrote about in this post, previously given place names may continue to be used even by those who have no knowledge of the naming language or the original meaning. George R. Stewart attributes this phenomenon to the fact that “the giving of new names is an act of labor” (1975, p. 53) and […]
A Brief Background in Semiotics and Some Philosophy of Place Naming
Place naming is a form of semiosis, which is the process of conveying meaning through symbols. We use language to represent our thoughts and to share those thoughts with other people; language, the collection of sounds and phrases that we put together to convey that meaning, is therefore a kind of symbol. A place name […]
Thinking about Place and Place Naming
“To be at all— to exist in any way —is to be somewhere, and to be somewhere is to be in some kind of place. Place is as requisite as the air we breathe, the ground on which we stand, the bodies we have” (Casey, 2013). We are born into place and our lives are […]
What is the O’nonna? Explaining the Theory
With my PhD officially in hand, one of the biggest projects left to do is to make sure that the dissertation itself is accessible. While it can be found here, what I really means is that in this space I will take some time to “translate” it into non-technical terms. Because it is a rather […]