This paper describes the toponymy of the Abui community of Eastern Indonesia (Papuan, Alor Archipelago). In absence of detailed cartographic documentation, we have built a database of Abui place names. The data was collected using various tasks (hiking, narratives, map-drawing and elicitation) and annotated in a database tracking the type of place name, its etymology, and the onomastic source. The paper demonstrates that the toponymic pattern in the Abui community is largely native, transparent, and derived from the agricultural and horticultural use of the landscape. The most prominent source of place names are tree names (both fruit and cash crop). In their swiddening practice, the Abui farmers promoted the growth of certain tree species and derived landmark names from them. These names provide evidence of the emergence of secondary forest, stimulated by the targeted harvesting of trees such as canarium or candlenut over the past centuries. The peripheral, coastal toponymic interface records traces of inter-island trade driven by the available cash crops. Finally, we report the social functions of place names. Place name sequences function as keychains, which affirm kin relations, stake out land claims and rights but also verify the truthfulness of certain ancestral myths. The paper shows that even in areas where detailed cartographic and historical data are absent, a great deal of information can be obtained from the systematic study of toponyms and their function in various types of discourse.

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Public transport is integral to the development of cities. It promotes economic development, mitigates environmental degradation, and fosters a sense of social cohesion. Notwithstanding, one can understand a place’s culture, geography, history, languages, and sociopolitical structures by studying the naming practices in public transport, such as bus routes and train stations, among others. This article studies the naming conventions in Singapore’s Mass Rapid Transit (MRT) system, which serves millions of commuters daily, and alludes to the importance of public transport in urban spaces. The paper analyses MRT station names, which can be regarded as toponyms, of the North South and Downtown lines according to two aspects: firstly, by conducting a linguistic analysis of the languages used in naming these MRT stations and, secondly, by applying toponymic classifications from current research in grouping the MRT stations themselves. Ultimately, the study compares the naming practices of Singapore’s oldest and second newest MRT lines using a sociolinguistic and historical toponomastics mixed methods approach, studying the MRT station names based on social categories as well as using historical sources to account for the linguistic and historical meaning of these toponyms. This work is aimed at providing scholars and a general audience with a better understanding of Singapore’s language, culture, and society through the analysis of the naming practices of the MRT station names, unique toponyms in the urban transport of the Lion City.

This paper is aimed at investigating the applicability of the notion of Sequent Occupance to the Singapore context. Sequent Occupance as a phenomenon in Human Geography was first theorized by Derwent Whittlesey in 1929 in order to describe the current cultural landscape of a region as a combination of all the people which have ‘sequentially’ occupied that region from the past to the present. According to the Sequence Occupance Theory, the cultural imprint of each civilization is never completely lost and its traces can be seen to the present day. This is a historical phenomenon that occurs in the same region or space, but at different times. Sequent Occupance regards each region as a pattern of many cultural layers laid upon each other, where each layer can be attributed to a particular civilization or culture, which overlaps the ones before it. Singapore, with its multilingual and multicultural context and with its colonial past, is a very important test-bed for Sequence Occupance approaches both in the fields of Historical Toponomastics and Human Geography. This paper aims to apply the notion of Sequence Occupance to the study of Singapore Toponomastics with a focus on Odonymy and Micro-Toponyms. The study discusses the notion of Sequent Occupance in Singapore in the light of several local Toponyms, trying to ascertain if this concept can be applied to the diachronic and synchronic development of the Urban Toponymy of the Lion City. The article also highlights historical processes in the “making” of the multi-layered Singapore society.

This paper describes the Linear A/Minoan digital corpus and the approaches we applied to develop it. We aim to set up a suitable study resource for Linear A and Minoan.