placename – Geolinguistics: Language on the Land

A Failure in Translation

January 4, 2021 Rebekah Ingram

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 reasons. For me, personally, it is the location of the school that I attended, my work location, and the location of friends and family members….

Why do we not know what some places mean?

September 19, 2020 Rebekah Ingram

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 it is often easier to use names that are already in place than it is to create new ones. Multiple groups of people using multiple…

A Brief Background in Semiotics and Some Philosophy of Place Naming

September 4, 2020 Rebekah Ingram

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 uses language to create a symbol which expresses spatial information. This information can be expressed in different types of language: oral language (speaking and listening),…

Geolinguistics: Language on the Land

At the intersection of geography, linguistics and culture

Browsed by
Tag: placename