International Congress of Onomastic Sciences, ICOS XXIII
Permanent URI for this community
Browse
Browsing International Congress of Onomastic Sciences, ICOS XXIII by Author "Coates, Richard"
Now showing 1 - 2 of 2
Results Per Page
Sort Options
Item Open Access A Glimpse through a Dirty Window into an Unlit House: Names of Some North-West European Islands(York University, 2009) Coates, RichardIt is well known that many of the major island-names of the archipelago consisting politically of Ireland, the United Kingdom and Crown dependencies are etymologically obscure. In this paper, I present and analyse a corpus of those which remain unexplained or uncertainly explained, for instance 'Man' and 'Ynys Môn', 'Ar(r)an', 'Uist', 'Seil', 'Islay', 'Mull', 'Scilly', 'Thanet', 'Sark', among others. It is timely to do this, since in the disciplines of archaeology and genetics there is an emerging consensus that after the last Ice Age the islands were repopulated mainly by people from a refuge on the Iberian peninsula. This opinion is at least superficially compatible with Theo Vennemann’s Semitic and Vasconic hypotheses, i.e., that languages (a) of the Afroasiatic family, and (b) ancestral to Basque, are important contributors to the lexical and onomastic stock of certain European languages. The unexplained or ill-explained island names form a sufficiently large set to make it worthwhile to hope for the emergence of some hard evidence bearing on their collective linguistic heritage, and therefore to give – or fail to give – preliminary support to Vennemann’s hypotheses.Item Open Access A Natural History of Proper Naming in the Context of Emerging Mass Production: The Case of British Railway Locomotives before 1846(York University, 2009) Coates, RichardThe early history of railway locomotives in Britain is marked by two striking facts. The first is that many were given proper names, even where there was no objective need to distinguish them in such a way. The second is that those names tended strongly to suggest essential attributes of the machines themselves, sometimes real as in the case of 'Puffing Billy', or metaphorical or mythologized as in the cases of 'Rocket' and 'Vulcan'. However when, before long, locomotives came to be produced to standard types, namegiving remained the norm for at least some types but the names themselves tended to be typed, and naturally in a less constrained way than earlier ones. The later onymic types veered sharply away from being literally or metaphorically descriptive. The sources of these second-order onymic types are of some interest, both culturally and anthropologically, and some types tended to be of very long currency in Britain. This paper explores the early history of namegiving in an underexplored area, and proposes a general model for the evolution of name-bestowal practices.