Toponyms

Recent scholarship on toponyms favors the study of street names, but these theories can also be applied to the naming of neighborhoods within a city.  The Mission Hills and Logan Heights neighborhoods of San Diego effectively illustrate the changing nature of symbolic capital and symbolic violence in the linguistic study of toponyms through time.  The genesis of these neighborhoods shows the use of symbolic capital in the naming of communities, as well as the use of symbolic violence in the claiming of space.  Both of these situations highlight the recent “critical turn” in the linguistic subfield of toponyms.

Les initiatives se multiplient pour dénoncer le privilège accordé aux hommes dans les odonymes commémoratifs de personnalités des grandes villes occidentales. Autrement dit, il devient de moins en moins supportable que le grand livre commémoratif et identitaire que constitue le répertoire des noms de voies et de lieux accorde un privilège inouï aux hommes et évite même soigneusement certaines figures féminines. Ce marquage symbolique et matériel du paysage contribuant grandement à la perpétuation de stéréotypes patriarcaux. L’émergence simultanée d’une préoccupation post-moderne prend des formes différentes selon les acteurs qui s’emparent de la question et selon les caractéristiques et la localisation des collectivités qui mettent en œuvre des politiques dédiées. Ainsi un important champ contemporain de la toponymie politique, à savoir la promotion des noms de femmes dans l’odonymie, doit être étudié en combinaison avec des éléments de contexte géopolitique qui permettent d’expliquer les différentes formes que prennent les politiques et les revendications en la matière.

Penny lane est devenu un métatoponyme, peut être même le métatoponyme par excellence. En effet, le toponyme a aujourd’hui acquis une renommée mondiale qui en fait un haut lieu de la culture occidentale en tant qu’icône de la pop music. Le toponyme a ainsi connu une trajectoire allant du désignateur de lieu ordinaire, choisi pour cela indépendamment de son signifié originel (John Penny, marchand esclavagiste), dans une œuvre relevant du genre de la pastorale suburbaine, vers un désignateur de haut lieu patrimonial et touristique. Parallèlement, le tournant mémoriel et réflexif postcolonial a rattrapé le toponyme en rappelant son signifié originel et en jouant sur sa notoriété dans un autre registre pour attirer l’attention sur la question mémorielle d’une ville impliquée dans la traite esclavagiste. Le toponyme est alors mis en avant pour sa valeur pédagogique mais est absous de toute obligation d’épuration toponymique compte tenu de son autre valeur patrimoniale positive et d’échelle mondiale.

"This work largely deals with the practical possibilities of the analysis of urban toponyms
and their interpretation, which may be appealing in the field of multidisciplinary studies
of sociology, history and geography. Our ambition has been to attempt to verify the
statement that the names of streets, squares or parks in the historical centre of cities
serve as indicators of official views and ideological impressions on the political, social
and historical events, in the context of Central Europe. This study analyses the current
network of streets in the historical centre of Bratislava, Trnava, Trenčín, Nitra, Banská
Bystrica, Žilina, Košice and Prešov. We will attempt to define basic tendencies in the
process of nomenclature of streets, while we pay attention to their thematic focus. The
study aims to determine the intensity of local, regional and national identity, based on geographical research, at the model territory of the historical centre of cities, through the
names of streets and squares in the eight regional cities.
KEYWORDS: territory, regional cities, urban toponyms, identity, ideology"

After the First World War, the German colonial empire was put under the mandate of the League of Nations. Day-to-day administrative affairs in former German Togoland were handed, under the stewardship of the League of Nations, to the United Kingdom and France. The shift from German to French administration in the eastern part led to the implementation of numerous changes including the renaming of places in the capital city Lomé: each and every name relating to Germany being banned and replaced by others relating to France or French colonial history. Another limited round of place renaming took place from 1960, in celebration of the country’s independence from French colonial rule. The 1967 military coup meant political and military empowerment of people from the North over the political elite from the South showing in many ways where the new power came from. Place renaming occurred again, even in rural areas. In the 1970s, a name cleansing – topononymic as well as patronymic – took place under the new political ideology of “African authenticity”. Nevertheless, by law, each and every Togolese citizen had to change his/her name to an “authentic” one, with no means of escape since new identity documents were no longer issued with former Christian names. Allowing individuals to keep their former Christian names was a strong demand in the national sovereign conferences that took place in the 1990s. Nowadays, and despite other social priorities having to be achieved quickly, place renaming still occurs according to two principles dealing with power, although in very different ways. In the Litimé, a remote rural area which is a former frontier where land issue is at stake after the saturation of settled land, competition over land ownership is set between local people and foreign settlers. Traditional leaders, in cooperation with the ruling party, tried to take over the local toponymy in an attempt to remove the names of settlements and neighbourhoods with foreign origins. In the capital city, at the time of the so-called “political opening”, symbolic places (landmarks) continue to celebrate the memory of the former dictator through brand new names, even if symbolic concessions are made in an attempt to bring balance and honour the memory of the leaders of the independence movement. A century after the first colonial toponymic struggle in Togo, political place name issues are still on the agenda of both central power and local stakeholders.

"An especially challenging aspect of transliteration is adopting an adequate system that can be used by an average person who may be unable to interpret diacritics or all the character and character combinations used in traditional and contemporary systems. Also, significant phonological differences between two languages such as those between Arabic and English, and the absence of a consistently used universal system, may result in numerous variations in the spelling of a name. This paper, part of a larger study that the authors are conducting, proposes a simplified system for the English transliteration of Oman‟s place names written in the Arabic script. The system is meant to be used on tourist maps, at tourist sites, on signposts, and in marketing and public relations material.
Considering the importance of toponyms in conveying the historical and cultural heritage of a people, the extended project will examine the linguistic aspects of all Oman‟s toponyms, such as their morpho-syntactic and semantic properties and also their lexical-source domains. The research will further illustrate how cross-cultural influences on place name phonology may serve as narratives of identity and symbolic resistance to the dominant majority."

""The paper documents what can probably be considered the last megafaunal extinction event in the Iberian Peninsula, namely that of the half-ass locally called zebro or encebro, from a double toponymic and historiographica perspective. Since there are serious hints that this animal might correspond to the Equus hydruntinus of the european pleistocene, the work constitutes what will be a fisrt attempt to solve this long-standing paleontological riddle, a riddle in which archaeozoological findings are already starting to provide data as well.

KEYWORDS: ENCEBRO, ZEBRO, ONAGER. HALF-ASS, Equus hydruntinus, IBERIA, EXTINCTlON, TOPONYMS, HISTORICAL SOURCE""

"English abstract:
The Historical Background of a Topographical List of Ramesses III


Topographical lists are a literary and artistic genre which has been
discussed widely in scholarly literature. The potential of this genre for the study of historical geography of the Land of Canaan in the Bronze and Iron ages was identified immediately. Many scholars studied these lists and tried to identify archaeological tells with toponyms mentioned in the lists. However, in most cases, these lists could not be used to learn about the history of Canaan, since many of them were copied from prototypes dating from the days of Thutmosis III (1479–1425 BCE) and Ramesses II (1279–1212 BCE), and could only capsulate the historical reality during the reign of the latter. Furthermore, not enough attention was given to the physical setting of the list within the scene, the accompanying epigraphs and the corpus of royal texts. In this article I re-examine a topographical list of Ramesses III from his mortuary temple at Medinet Habu in western Thebes. I discuss the significance of the originality of the toponyms and their possible identification, the integration of the list within the scene of Pharaoh smiting his enemies, and its relation to the royal inscriptions of Ramesses
III. The list appears to be original and unique and reflects the outcome of the battle of Ramesses III against the Philistines and their allies."