Consultations show low support for renaming Winnipeg streets

A report heading to Winnipeg’s city council shows low support for changing street or park names or removing historical markers despite the sometimes problematic history of people they’re named after.

Community consultations for Welcoming Winnipeg: Reconciling our History shows 49 per cent of respondents did not want historical markers removed, even if, from a modern perspective, the actions of the honouree was controversial. However, 23 per cent of respondents were fine with changing or removing names.

The city of Winnipeg embarked on the community consultations after Mayor Brian Bowman announced last January that the city would review how it names streets and places, acknowledging the lack of Indigenous history in the city’s naming systems.

About Names: A famed French saint aided the name Lorraine’s reign

Actor Lorraine Toussaint (Photo Source: Caitlin Watkins)

Dr. Cleveland Evans writes about names for the Omaha World-Herald. In his January 31st column, he looks at the history of the name Lorraine.

Lorraine is a region in northeastern France. It’s the modern form of Lotharingia, a medieval kingdom named after its first ruler, Lothair II (835-869), a great-grandson of Charlemagne. France and England fought to control northern France for centuries. In the 1300s, prophecies claiming France would be saved by “a virgin from the borders of Lorraine” began to spread. Today in English, that virgin is called St. Joan of Arc (1412-31). Though in France, she’s most often “Jeanne d’Arc,” she’s sometimes called “Jeanne de Lorraine.”

A few American parents named daughters Lorraine, probably as a variation of Laura, in the early 19th century. The 1850 census found over 30, most in upstate New York. Publicity about the Franco-Prussian War helped the name rise. This accelerated after American novelist Robert W. Chambers published “Lorraine: A Romance” in 1897. There, Lorraine, daughter of the Marquis de Nesville, is saved by (and marries) American adventurer Jack Marche after her father is killed piloting a military balloon.

Though Lorraine stayed in the top 100 until 1949, it then swiftly receded except for a minor uptick in 1985, when Lea Thompson played Marty McFly’s mom, Lorraine, in “Back to the Future.”

Want to know more? Read on to find out more about Lorraines in history!

13th Workshop on Building and Using Comparable Corpora

If you are interested in extracting proper names and named entities from comparable corpora, do not hesitate to submit your paper for the 13th Workshop on Building and Using Comparable Corpora in Marseille (France, May 11 2020).

In the language engineering and the linguistics communities, research in comparable corpora has been motivated by two main reasons. In language engineering, on the one hand, it is chiefly motivated by the need to use comparable corpora as training data for statistical NLP applications such as statistical and neural machine translation or cross-lingual retrieval. In linguistics, on the other hand, comparable corpora are of interest in themselves by making possible cross-language discoveries and comparisons.  As such, it is of great interest to bring together builders and users of such corpora.

Call Deadline: 25-Feb-2020

Submission Information: Please see the BUCC 2018 website at http://comparable.limsi.fr/bucc2020/

New Yorkers honor NBA legend by renaming a subway stop ‘Kobe Bryant Park’

Subway riders found a creative way to pay tribute to Los Angeles Lakers legend Kobe Bryant with a makeshift sign at the Bryant Park subway station. The sign at the 42nd St-Bryant Park Station was plastered with the name “Kobe” over “42nd Street” in order to read: “Kobe Bryant Park.” The makeshift memorial was just one of many tributes around the country as fans gathered to mourn the star.

Bryant died in a California helicopter crash along with his 13-year-old daughter Gianna. Also killed in the crash were girls’ basketball coach Christina Mauser, college baseball coach John Altobelli, his daughter Alyssa Altobelli and wife Keri Altobelli.

What’s in a Name? An Historical Perspective on Place Names in West Bath

In the third lecture (February 1, 2020) of the Town History Series, Don Bruce will present a number of stories about the origin and meaning of place names in West Bath (Maine, USA).

The Sagadahoc History and Genealogy Room announces its sixteenth annual Town History Series, jointly sponsored by the Patten Free Library and the Bath Historical Society. On five Saturday mornings in January and February, from 10:30-11:30 A.M., people from the five towns that support the Library will present aspects of their towns’ histories in the Community Room of the Patten Free Library. The Series will be filmed for showing on local TV. The talks will be free and open to the public.

The new pneumonia-causing virus needs a name

With the reality that a previously unknown animal virus has started infecting people, the world faces a recurring question: What does one call it?

The pneumonia-causing virus, which is spreading rapidly in China and beyond, is currently being identified as 2019-nCoV, shorthand for a novel or new (i.e. “n”) coronavirus (CoV) that was first detected in 2019. The disease it causes doesn’t yet have a name, either, though Wuhan SARS or Wu Flu are among of the options being thrown around on the internet.

None of these is likely to be the virus’ or the disease’s permanent name. They almost certainly would be unacceptable to the Chinese, and to the World Health Organization, which discourages the use of place names in the naming of diseases. As for the virus, the longer it spreads the less novel it becomes.

So how to name it? And who gets to name it?

Words you may not have known were named after people

The Merriam-Webster Dictionary site is an epicurean and sometimes mercurial presentation of language that tantalizes even the most Draconian and martinet-ish of word lovers. A case in point: The delightful “Eponym Quiz,” which tests your knowledge of many of the words in the previous sentence that are based on the names of people. This article in the Columbia Journalism Review discusses well-known – and more obscure – eponyms. Here’s a sample:

In traditional usage an “eponym” is something that has loaned its name to something else. By extension, in everyday usage and many dictionaries, the “eponym” is also the thing that borrowed the name.

Some eponyms have retained the capitalization of their namesakes, such as “Bakelite” (1909), a trademark for the first synthetic plastic, created by Leo Baekeland. Most have lost their capitalization, though some are recognizable as deriving from names. For example, “béchamel” sauce, named for the Marquis Louis de Béchamel, a steward to Louis XIV of France in the late 17th century. The sauce had probably been brought to France at least a hundred years earlier, but the Marquis got naming rights. (The Oxford English Dictionary says it first appeared in English in 1789 spelled “bishemel.”)

Click through to read more!

About Names: Arrokoth, Greta Thunberg are among top names of 2019

Swedish environmental activist Greta Thunberg attends a climate strike in Stockholm on Friday, Dec. 20.

Dr. Cleveland Evans writes about names for the Omaha World-Herald. In his January 18th column, he looks at the American Name Society’s Name of the Year.

Do you know where Arrokoth is? At its meeting in New Orleans on Jan. 3 2020, the American Name Society voted Arrokoth 2019’s Name of the Year.

In November, NASA announced this as the name of “minor planet 486958.” Before the New Horizons probe flew over this far-away rock in the Kuiper Belt on Jan. 1, 2019, NASA received about 34,000 name suggestions. Their initial selection, Ultima Thule, was abandoned when it turned out that Ultima Thule was used by Nazi occultists as the mythical home of the “Aryan race.” Arrokoth means “sky” in Powhatan, an extinct Algonquian language formerly spoken in eastern Virginia.

ANS chose Names of the Year for place names, artistic-literary names, personal names, trade names, e-names and miscellaneous names before picking the overall Name of the Year.

“Greta Thunberg” won personal name of the year. Swedish teen Thunberg, who turned 17 on Jan. 3, leads a global youth movement addressing climate change. She was chosen as Time magazine’s Person of the Year for 2019, and her name has become a byword for youth climate activists. Their influence on politics is called the Greta Effect. A documentary film about the movement is titled “Make the World Greta Again.”

Want to know more? Read on to find out more about ANS Names of the Year!

Soon you’ll be able to correct Google’s name pronunciations

Intrepid sleuths at XDA-Developers have uncovered code in the latest Google App, buld 10.93, that may be part of a new feature to improve the apps pronunciation abilties when it comes to proper names. Right now if your name is hard for Google to pronounce, your best option is to find the Nickname settings and enter a more transliteral spelling that forces Google to say it the way you prefer. Quite inelegent.

The new feature gives you the option to “record your own” pronunciation. It is unclear what happens then, once Google has a recording. At best there will be some sort of AI methodology to analyze the way you pronounce the name, then transpose your pronunciation onto the Assistant’s voice. At worst it may just play the recording of you reading your own name, but that seems unlikely.

McGill BA student receives American Name Society’s Emerging Scholar Award

Congratulations to McGill BA student, Marielle Côté-Gendreau, who was recently awarded the American Name Society Emerging Scholar Award, which recognizes “outstanding scholarship of a names researcher in the early stages of his/her academic or professional career”. She received the award for her submitted article “Tracking Napoleon, his name and his myth in 19th century French Canada: Sociodemographic regard on a revealing naming pattern“, at the 2020 Annual Meeting of the American Name Society, which meets concurrently with the Linguistics Society of America, last week in New Orleans. Congratulations Marielle!