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Lecture “Place-names and the medieval landscape in the Manchester area”, Manchester, UK, November 6 2019

This lecture focuses on the place-names of Greater Manchester and adjacent area, looking at the elements or linguistic building blocks which make up the names themselves, and showing how they may be mapped, plotted and interpreted. We will look at examples of medieval documents which give us early forms of the names, showing how the methodologies for interpretation have evolved over the past 200 years.

Place-names are among the defining markers of modern society – and they have much to tell us about how the society developed.

About the speaker: Alan Crosby read geography at St Edmund Hall, Oxford, and has a doctorate from Oxford University. He is one of Britain’s leading local and regional historians, and since 2001 has been the editor of The Local Historian, the national journal for the subject.

Call for papers: Grapholinguistics in the 21st Century, Paris, France, June 17-19 2020

G21C (Grapholinguistics in the 21st Century) is a biennial conference bringing together disciplines concerned with grapholinguistics and more generally the study writing systems and their representation in written communication. The conference aims to reflect on the current state of research in the area, and on the role that writing and writing systems play in neighboring disciplines like computer science and information technology, communication, typography, psychology, and pedagogy.

They welcome proposals from all disciplines concerned with the study of written language, writing systems, and their implementation in information systems: epistemology of grapholinguistics, history, onomastics, topics, interaction with other disciplines, etc.

Submission deadline: January 13, 2020

You are invited to submit original contributions in the form of extended abstracts (not exceeding 1,000 words), written in English and anonymized.

Stories Behind Georgia Place-Names, Cumming, GA, November 4 2019

Ever wonder how Rough and Ready got its name? Or what Stonesthrow is a stone’s throw from? The curious Georgian can’t help pondering the seemingly endless supply of head-scratching place names that dot this state.

Luckily, the intrepid Cathy Kaemmerlen, author of Georgia Place-Names from Jot-Em-Down to Doctortown, stands ready to unravel the enigmas – Enigma is, in fact, a Georgia town – behind the state’s most astonishing appellations. Cow Hell, Gum Pond, Boxankle and Lord a Mercy Cove? One town owes its name to a random sign that fell off a railcar, while another memorializes a broken bone suffered by a cockfight spectator. And just how many place names were inspired by insolent mules? Come on in to find out.

Copies of Georgia Place-Names from Jot-Em-Down to Doctortown will be available for purchase and signing.

When: Mon, Nov. 4, 2019 at 6:30 PM
Where: Forsyth County Public Library – Hampton Park Library, 5345 Settingdown Road, Cumming, GA, 30041

Name Change Reflects Shift in United Nations Approach to Communications

Renaming the Department of Global Communications was a reflection of a shift in the way in which the United Nations approaches communications, the departmental head told the Fourth Committee (Special Political and Decolonization) after it approved three draft resolutions on decolonization issues before taking up questions relating to information.

Melissa Fleming, Under-Secretary-General for Global Communications, told the Committee that the newly renamed entity — formerly the Department of Public Information — aims to make the public care about multilateralism through storytelling and by humanizing its work. She went on to say that coverage of the General Assembly’s recent high-level period demonstrated the Department’s strategic advance planning, which — alongside its more integrated multimedia production — helped to create multilingual content that was distributed in real time across multiple platforms.

About Names: From the Bible to ‘Family Guy,’ Seth’s had a long run

Actor Seth Rogan

Dr. Cleveland Evans writes about names for the Omaha World-Herald. In his October 26th column, he looks at the history of the name Seth.

Seth is the English form of Shet, Hebrew for “appointed.” In the Bible’s Book of Genesis, Seth is Adam and Eve’s third son, born after oldest brother Cain kills second brother Abel. That’s about all Genesis says. Later legends say Seth journeys to Paradise, where he sees a vision of the future newborn Jesus. Seth writes a book describing the star foretelling the baby’s birth. Centuries later, this guides the wise men to Bethlehem.

These legends were featured in “Cursor Mundi,” a poem written in northern England around 1300. Perhaps that’s why Seth was used by several prominent Yorkshire families by 1450, a century before the Reformation created a general fashion for Old Testament names.

When Social Security’s yearly baby name lists started in 1880, Seth ranked 349th. Like most Old Testament names, it then declined, bottoming out at 907th in 1930. Seth then rose, booming in the 1970s to a plateau at around No. 100 between 1979 and 1997. Pop culture doesn’t seem to have had a big influence, even though its first peak, at 89th in 1987, was helped by the 1986 horror film “The Fly,” in which scientist Seth Brundle (Jeff Goldblum) turns into an insect.

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

Americans, we can name an exoplanet!

 

The International Astronomical Union (IAU) invites you to help name an exoplanet and its star.

A national committee for the US naming event has been specially created by the National Outreach Coordinators to carry out the campaign at the national level. The national committee strictly follows the methodology and guidelines set up by the IAU100 NameExoWorlds Steering Committee and is responsible for providing the conditions for public participation, disseminating the project in the country and establishing a voting system.

The US Exoplanet Naming Campaign collected names from September 15 – October 15, 2019. The US National Committee received hundreds of proposals. A group of 40 amateur and professional astronomers, teachers and students will identify 10 proposals that will be voted on by the US public. This list of 10 semi-finalists will be made public and available for public voting on November 1st, 2019. Public voting will be open until November 14, 2019. The top three selected by US voters will be submitted by November 15 to the IAU100 NameExoworlds Steering Committee for the final choice. The final result will be announced by the IAU the week of December 16 – 21, 2019.

Chicago Aldermen Propose New Name for Lake Shore Drive

Two City Council members want to rename Lake Shore Drive to honor Chicago’s founder, Jean Baptiste Point duSable.

DuSable, a black pioneer and fur trader, was the first non-indigenous person to live in what is now Chicago. The idea came to Ald. David Moore three years ago while taking a tour of the city. Moore and Ald. Sophia King introduced an ordinance to the Committee on Transportation and the Public Way to rename Lake Shore Drive. Moore also sees the name change as an opportunity to educate tourists and Chicago residents, both young and old, about the city’s founder.

DuSable was born in Haiti in 1745 to a French mariner and a mother who was a slave of African descent. He arrived in the 1770s and lived alongside the Chicago River near Lake Michigan. He farmed and traded fur and grain.

Call for Papers: SLA 2020, Future Imperfect: Language in Times of Crisis and Hope, Boulder, Colorado, April 2-5 2020,

The Society for Linguistic Anthropology, in partnership with graduate students in the Program in Culture, Language, and Social Practice (CLASP) at the University of Colorado Boulder, is pleased to announce the SLA 2020 Conference, to be held April 2-5, 2020 in Boulder, Colorado. The theme is “Future Imperfect: Language in Times of Crisis and Hope”. Please see the conference website for more information on the theme.

It will take place at the Hilton on Canyon in Boulder, Colorado, on April 2-5, 2020. The SLA Conference Steering Committee welcomes all submissions advancing the study of language and society, but we are especially interested in work that engages the 2020 conference theme.

The SLA will prioritize submissions for organized panels, individual presentations, roundtables, posters, and installations that engage productively with our conference theme and involve creative and diverse participation across methods, disciplines, institutions, and professional levels. We especially welcome panels that involve graduate students, activists, and/or public figures in addition to faculty. We also encourage conference participants to consider presenting new or in-progress research in order to take full advantage of SLA’s interdisciplinary community of scholars. To that end, we encourage participants who have an innovative proposal that does not readily fit into the conference format to contact the conference organizers at slaboulder@gmail.com for independent consideration.

The submission portal will open on Tuesday, October 8.

The deadline for submissions is December 1, 2019.

Call for papers: 14. International Conference on Cartographic Engineering and Mapping, London, UK, August 20-21 2020

The ICCEM 2020 aims to bring together leading academic scientists, researchers and research scholars to exchange and share their experiences and research results on all aspects of Cartographic Engineering and Mapping. It also provides a premier interdisciplinary platform for researchers, practitioners and educators to present and discuss the most recent innovations, trends, and concerns as well as practical challenges encountered and solutions adopted in the fields of Cartographic Engineering and Mapping.

Call for Contributions

Prospective authors are kindly encouraged to contribute to and help shape the conference through submissions of their research abstracts, papers and e-posters. Also, high quality research contributions describing original and unpublished results of conceptual, constructive, empirical, experimental, or theoretical work in all areas of Cartographic Engineering and toponymy are cordially invited for presentation at the conference.

Abstracts/Full-Text Paper Submission Deadline: October 31, 2019

Call for papers: Society for Name Studies in Britain and Ireland’s Spring Conference, Wales, April 17-20 2020

The SNSBI’s 29th Annual Spring Conference will be held in the Best Western Heronston Hotel (Bridgend, Wales, UK) on April 17-20, 2020.

Proposals are invited for twenty-minute papers and short project reports on any aspect of name-studies in Britain and Ireland. Abstracts of no more than 200 words should be sent by 31 October 2019. Informal enquiries are also welcomed.

Proposals for papers should be sent to:

Dr Rebecca Gregory
School of English
University of Nottingham NG7 2RD
rebecca.gregory@nottingham.ac.uk