Columbia Plateau Indian Place Names: What Can They Teach Us?

Hunn, Eugene S.

doi:10.1525/jlin.1996.6.1.3

Cited by 73 publications

(58 citation statements)

References 15 publications

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“…'langue', and not direct relationships between the system and processes outside the system. This view differs from a utilitarian angle that argues for 'regional universals' (Hunn 1996) where there will always be consistent 'relative' relationships between language and thought. These relationships are contingent on the particular context in which they occur, which underlies Hunn's notion of 'universal relativism'.…”

Section: Place Names People and Languagementioning

confidence: 86%

Language and Place-knowledge on Norfolk Island

Nash

Low²

2014

Ethnos

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Using the place-naming practices in the small settler society of Norfolk Island, the home of Anglo-Polynesian descendants of the Bounty mutineers, we advance a linguistic argument against Saussure's claims concerning the arbitrariness of signs. When extended to place names, Saussure's claims about language in general imply place names in themselves hold no significance for how people interact with places. In contrast, we use ethnographic examples to show that people of Norfolk Island interact with the significance of the names themselves. Arguments for an integrated approach to toponymy in which place names are considered alongside other relational (cultural, economic and historical) factors that influence their use and meaning are put forward. We propose 'toponymic ethnography' as a useful methodology for understanding the connectedness of toponyms to people, place, and social networks.

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Section: Place Names People and Languagementioning

confidence: 86%

Language and Place-knowledge on Norfolk Island

Nash

Low²

2014

Ethnos

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“…Many researchers are using GIS and information technology to study the relationship of place names and landscapes in many fields, such as linguistics, anthropology, epistemology, ontology, and environmental theory [22][23][24][25][26][27][28][29].…”

Section: Previous Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Landscape Analysis of Geographical Names in Hubei Province, China

Chen

Ren

et al. 2014

Entropy

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Hubei Province is the hub of communications in central China, which directly determines its strategic position in the country's development. Additionally, Hubei Province is well-known for its diverse landforms, including mountains, hills, mounds and plains. This area is called "The Province of Thousand Lakes" due to the abundance of water resources. Geographical names are exclusive names given to physical or anthropogenic geographic entities at specific spatial locations and are important signs by which humans understand natural and human activities. In this study, geographic information systems (GIS) technology is adopted to establish a geodatabase of geographical names with particular characteristics in Hubei Province and extract certain geomorphologic and environmental factors. We carry out landscape analysis of mountain-related geographical names and water-related geographical names respectively. In the end, we calculate the information entropy of geographical names of each county to describe the diversity and inhomogeneity of place names in Hubei province. Our study demonstrates that geographical names represent responses to the cultural landscape and physical environment. The geographical names are more interesting in specific landscapes, such as mountains and rivers. OPEN ACCESSEntropy 2014, 16 6314

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“…Place names have been much investigated from an historical point of view; since they are highly conservative they reveal a great deal about the locations of ancient languages and peoples. However, the theory and crosslinguistic typology of place names -e.g., why some are descriptive, others not -is hardly developed at all (see e.g., Hunn, 1993).…”

Section: Space As a Semantic Domainmentioning

confidence: 99%

Space: Linguistic Expression

Levinson

2001

International Encyclopedia of the Social &Amp; Behavioral Sciences

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Spatial cognition is central to human thinking, and spatial language is thus an important area of study, as it may reveal fundamental properties of human thought. Recent research has shown that spatial language is much more divergent across languages than had previously been thought, suggesting significant cultural patterning of spatial conceptualization. This article reviews spatial language cross-linguistically, sets out a typological framework for the language of space, and considers the relationship of spatial language to spatial cognition, in the context of extensive linguistic diversity in the spatial domain.Spatial cognition is at the heart of much human thinking, as evidenced, for example, in the explanatory power of spatial metaphors and diagrams, and the explication of spatial concepts has played a key role in the development of Western mathematics and philosophy over two and a half millennia (see Jammer, 1954). It is therefore easy to assume that spatial notions form a robust, universal core of human cognition; this assumption has dominated the cognitive sciences (e.g., Miller and Johnson-Laird, 1976). But naive human spatial language turns out to vary significantly across languages, both in the way it is semantically organized and the way in which it is coded. This has major implications for how we should think about universals in human thought and language.The Western intellectual tradition has provided an elaborate metalanguage for spatial concepts, but the conceptual underpinnings of naive human spatial language utilize only a small subset of these concepts. Moreover, there are many aspects of our spatial perception and motor control which utilize much richer and more precise representations of space than are coded in language. The study of the representation of space in language, and its relation to cognition, must therefore be treated as an empirical enterprise, and this article reports on the increasing body of cross-linguistic information about how different languages structure the spatial domain (see Levinson and Wilkins, 2006).

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Columbia Plateau Indian Place Names: What Can They Teach Us?

Cited by 73 publications

References 15 publications

Language and Place-knowledge on Norfolk Island

Language and Place-knowledge on Norfolk Island

Landscape Analysis of Geographical Names in Hubei Province, China

Space: Linguistic Expression

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