A University of Minnesota task force has recommended changing the names of four Twin Cities campus buildings because of what it deemed their namesakes’ racist or anti-Semitic practices. The group’s report, released in February 20, comes after a 16-month process that some regents and students have criticized as overly plodding, with the task force following up last year on the work of an earlier committee. The task force backed renaming Coffman Memorial Union — for former U President Lotus Coffman, who presided over a major university expansion but also excluded black students from campus housing and programs — as well as three other buildings. President Eric Kaler will review that report and present his own proposal to the U’s governing board in March.

The official change of the country’s name was first implemented on Macedonian government website, which will be followed by the replacement of signage at the various border crossings due to take place today.

The flag of  NATO was raised in front of the Macedonian government building in an official ceremony held on the 12th February 2019 to mark Macedonia’s signing of the accession protocol to join the military alliance. The photographers documented the removal of old signs and the set-up of new ones. There is a five-year period laid out in the Prespes Agreement for all official documents and references to transition to the new name, so one should not expect changes overnight in all aspects of the country’s life.

Changing the Philippines’ name would require a new law and the public’s approval in a referendum, Malacañang said on Tuesday, February 12, 2019, after President Duterte had revived a proposal to rename the Philippines to “Maharlika.”

Proposals to change the name of the Philippines have been around since the 1970s. “Maharlika” is the Filipinos’ “ancient heritage,” long before the arrival of Western colonizers. “Maha” is Sanskrit for “noble” or “great” while “likha” means “create,” thus, Maharlika means “nobly created,” according to the article. But some scholars are opposed to the name change, saying it would disregard Filipinos’ historical roots and national identity.

Immigrating to a new country brings many challenges. For some people, voluntarily adopting a name similar to where someone is living, rather than keeping an original name, is one part of trying to assimilate or fit in with the new community. According to a new study focused on the United States, where anglicized names are more typical, anglicizing ethnic names may reduce bias towards immigrants. The results appear in Social Psychological and Personality Science.

Migrants Immigrants Merge Migration Integration

“We do not suggest immigrants to Anglicize their ethnic names in order to avoid discrimination,” says Xian Zhao (University of Toronto), lead author on the study. “This certainly puts the onus on immigrants to promote equity and our previous studies also suggest that Anglicizing names may have negative implications for one’s self-concept.”

A few state demonyms are probably well-known. By demonyms we mean the words you call people or things from a specific state (like “Pennsylvanian”, “Texan” or the entertaining “Michigander”). But not everybody knows that state demonyms follow a regional pattern.

The regional patterns are revealed in this map from Twitter’s OnlMaps where you may find the demonyms recommended by the U.S. Government Publishing Office. It is obvious that states in the same region tend to have the same suffix in their demonym: the old South and the West Coast generally end an “-ian,” New England ends in “-er,” the West in “-an.” A few stray states use “-ite.”

There are countless toponymic homographs that have different pronunciations depending on meaning and that cannot be found in traditional dictionaries (e.g. at least one Houston in each US state, not even counting street names…). To overcome the limitations of traditional dictionaries, Cofactor Ora integrates with the Google Knowledge Graph and lets everyone edit and contribute pronunciations of names: both audio recordings and IPA pronunciation respellings.

Referencing an entity in the Google Knowledge Graph, each place name in Ora is linked to a location in Google Maps, and each persons’ name is linked to the Wikipedia articles. This allows Ora to list pronunciations for any number of people, places, and things that ever existed. Go ahead and contribute to Ora now!