What would YOU call an 8 centimeter (okay, 4 inch), blue-n-orange multi-tentacled sea slug that eats stinging jellyfish found along Western Australia’s ocean waters? That was the question recently posed by the Western Australia Museum and ABC News in a public competition to name the curious creature. After reviewing thousands of onomastic suggestions, the winner of the competition was finally announced. The animal is now called “Mordilla fifo” in honor of the state’s mine workers. Learn more about this underwater species and the onomastic runner-ups.
What it’s like to be called Isis: ‘People ask, where’s your machine gun?’
There was a time, not so very long ago, when the female first name “Isis” was borne with a sense of pride. Today, women and girls who carry the name of this noble ancient Egyptian goddess report that those days are gone. Public outrage towards the similarly named terrorist group has made carrying this name a painful public burden. In a series of interviews conducted for The Guardian, UK journalist, Chitra Ramaswamy, tells readers about victims of this modern onomastic plight.
About Names: From a medieval queen to a first lady, Eleanors have made history
Dr. Cleveland Evans writes about names for the Omaha World-Herald. This recent column explores Eleanor.… Read More
Manuka: New Zealand moves to trademark the word, alarming Australian honey producers
Known by aficionados as “the champagne of honeys,” Manuka honey, or rather the name for the bewitching elixir, has become the center of an increasingly nasty onomastic battle Down Under.
On the one side of the wrangle is New Zealand, who claim that the name “Manuka” by rights is theirs because the one and only plant used by bees to produce this exclusive honey, the Leptospermum scoparium, is native to New Zealand and the name “Manuka” comes from the Maori language. According to John Rawcliffe, head of New Zealand’s Unique Manuka Factor Honey Association, this is reason enough for his country to own the trademark on this name.
Trevor White, however, from the Australian Honey Bee Industry Council, told ABC news in an interview this past August that this campaign is ridiculous because the plant also grows in Australia and ”the name has been used in Australia for many years going back into the 1800’s.”
While some observers might dismiss both arguments as petty, there is more at stake here than onomastic bragging rights. Thanks in part to the reputed anti-bacterial, anti-viral, anti-mircrobial benefits of the natural sweetener, the combined Manuka market in Australia and New Zealand is worth ca. three hundred million dollars.
Baby name regret: A guide for living with a unique name
Personal names are often all the rage one day and horrifically out the next. These maddeningly unpredictable yet routinely merciless changes in onomastic taste can leave name-bearers stranded with monikers that leave them cringing every time they hear the question: “What was your name again?” Melbourne-based comedian, social worker, and names enthusiast, Deirdre Fidge, (yes, D-E-I-R-D-R-E) offers fellow victims of parental onomastic whimsy some heartfelt advice.
Conference on Key Words in Contemporary Poland, Warsaw, Poland, October 20-21, 2016
On the 20th and 21st of October, 2016, the University of Warsaw will be holding a special conference on “key words in contemporary Poland.” With invited contributions from computational linguistics, lexicography, sociolinguistics, and corpus linguistics, the focus of this scientific summit will be international selections for the “word of the year.” The conference languages are Polish, German and English.
European Commission’s Joint Research Centre (JRC) Name Database
The European Commission’s Joint Research Centre (JRC) has recently released a multilingual onomastic resource for the names of persons and organizations. The JRC-Names database provides lists of these name types and their many spelling variants (up to several hundred for a single personal name) and includes multiple scripts (e.g. Latin, Greek, Cyrillic, Japanese, Chinese, etc). The resource is the by-product of the Europe Media Monitor (EMM) family of applications, which has been analyzing up to 300,000 news reports per day, since 2004.
The JRC-Names resource and accompanying software are available for download as text.
The new Linked Data resource, accessible through the European Union’s Open Data Portal, also offers supplementary information (e.g. frequency counts, historical onomastic background information, etc.).
The new Linked Data edition is available through a SPARQL endpoint and via a RDF dump. It is registered on the datahub.io portal as JRC-Names.
Additional information is available on this page of EU Open Data Portal.
eLex 2017, Leiden, Netherlands, September 19-21, 2017
From the 19th to the 21st of September 2017, the 5th biennial conference on electronic lexicography (eLex2017) will be held at the Holiday Inn in Leiden, Netherlands. The aim of the conference is to investigate state-of-the art technologies and methodologies for automating the creation of dictionaries. Attendees who are interested in presenting a 25 minute conference paper are invited to submit an abstract of between 300 and 500 words (excluding references) by the 1st of February 2017. The abstracts should be submitted via EasyChair.
Fourth International Conference on Onomastics Name and Naming (ICONN), Baia Mare, Romania, September 5-7, 2017
Announcing the Fourth International Conference on Onomastics Name and Naming: The event will be held September 5-7, 2017, in Baia Mare, Romania. It will focus on “Sacred and Profane in Onomastics.” Further information about the conference can be found on the ICONN 4 website.
5th International Summit of the Book, Limerick, Ireland, November 2-3, 2016
Registration is now open for the 5th International Summit of the Book in Limerick, Ireland. The summit will take place from the 2nd to the 3rd of November 2016. The event will be in the 4 star Limerick Strand Hotel. The purpose of this year’s Summit is to provide a forum for discussing the development of books into electronic formats and the subsequent impact on reading, addressing the tole of book translation in the preservation and transmission of culture. Among the list of scheduled speakers are John Van Oudenaren (Director, Scholarly and Educational Programs, The Library of Congress, Washington D.C. and Director, World Digital Library) and Dr. Sandra Collins (Director of the National Library of Ireland (NLI).