From 1788-1790 the first settlement in the area was called Losantiville. This name was given to the settlement by John Filson, one of the founders of Cincinnati. The name is a compilation of “L” for the Licking River, “os” from the Latin meaning “mouth”, “anti” from the Greek meaning “opposite”, and “ville” from Anglo-Saxon, meaning “city” or “town”. This comes out as “The Town Opposite the Mouth of the Licking”.
In 1790 General Arthur St. Clair, the first governor of the Northwest Territory and a member of the Society of the Cincinnati, did not like the name Losantiville and changed it to Cincinnati. The Cincinnati Society was named in honor of the Roman general Lucius Quinctius Cincinnatus. He lived in the Fifth century BC. While plowing his fields one day he was told to take command of Rome’s army. Within 15 days he led the army to victory over the enemy. He then went back to his plowing. The Society of the Cincinnati was started by, and consisted of, Continental Army officers of the American Revolution.
What accounts for name choices in a transnational context? What does the choice of ethnic or English names reveal about global identities and the desire to fit into a new culture? Drawing on the sociology of culture and migration, Philip Jun Fang and Gary Fine examine the intersection of naming, assimilation, and self-presentation in light of international student mobility. Based on 25 semi-structured interviews with mainland Chinese students enrolled in an elite Midwestern university, they find that these students make name choices by engaging in both transnational processes and situated practices. First, Chinese international students negotiate between multiple names to deal with ethnic distinctions. While ethnic names can signal distance from other ethnic communities, they also distinguish individuals from others. For these students, names are multi-layered and temporal: their name choices evolve throughout school lives, shaped by power relations in American cultural contexts and channeled by images of their home country. Second, multiple names allow these students to practice situated performance, incorporating the reflective self, the distinctive self, and the imagined self. The authors address “cross-cultural naming” that accounts for identity in transnational social spaces.
At its first appearance in records by explorers, the Chicago area was inhabited by a number of Algonquian peoples, including the Mascouten and Miami. The name “Chicago” is derived from a French rendering of the Native American word shikaakwa, known to botanists as Allium tricoccum, from the Miami-Illinois language. The first known reference to the site of the current city of Chicago as “Checagou” was by Robert de La Salle around 1679 in a memoir. Henri Joutel, in his journal of 1688, noted that the wild garlic, called “chicagoua”, grew abundantly in the area. According to his diary of late September 1687: “when we arrived at the said place called Chicagou which, according to what we were able to learn of it, has taken this name because of the quantity of garlic which grows in the forests in this region.”
After George Floyd, an African American, was killed during a police arrest in Minneapolis, United States, many people protested, in the United States and internationally. During the course of these protests, many controversial monuments and memorials were vandalized or toppled by protestors, prompting those in charge of other similar monuments to remove them from public view.
The High Desert Linguistics Society is pleased to announce our 14th biennial conference, HDLS 14. The conference will take place November 20-22, 2020 at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque, New Mexico. HDLS 14 will focus on research in cognitive and functional linguistics, typology, sociocultural linguistics, indigenous languages, and Hispanic linguistics. This conference will also highlight interdisciplinary research from the point of view of psychology, cognitive science, anthropology, education, and computer science, among others.
The recent global events of civil and political unrest that started in the US have brought to the fore the complex dynamics of urban memorialisation. The protests have, in some places, led to renewed scrutiny of certain urban symbols such as commemorative statues – what they represent and how they are perceived and interpreted.