History of the Commission
Proceedings of last Conferences
Toponyms in Cartography. Proceedings of the Toponymic Sessions at the 25th International Cartographic Conference, Paris, 3–8 July 2011, ed. by Peter Jordan and Ferjan Ormeling, Hamburg 2013, ISBN 978-3-8300-6700-9, 134 p.
The ICA 25th International Cartographic Conference in Paris in July 2011 is special from a toponymical point of view because it marks the first meeting of the joint ICA-IGU Commission on Toponymy.
Toponymy has been a regular theme for international cartographic conferences for decades, and it is only proper that this has been institutionalized now.
The subject of toponymy is now not only dealt within an onomastical context at the biannual ICOS meetings, and within an administrative context at the biannual UNGEGN meetings, but also within a geo-cartographic context at joint ICA-IGU meetings.
The toponymical contributions to the Paris International Cartographic Conference are diverse, both geographically and thematically. Geographically, the focus is on Brazil and on Europe, with a paper on Tunis as a Mediterranean extension of Europe.
The subjects range from the collection of geographical names to the operation of names servers, from the use of exonyms in school atlases to the creation of names data bases and from the reconstruction of former namescapes to the creation of new ones.
Contents:
Bailly Guillaume (France): Nommer les communautés de communes: état des lieux en 2012, à l’heure de la réforme territoriale
Dhieb, Mohsen (Saudi Arabia): Towards a geographical database of names in Tunisia: The case of the map sheet of Sfax NW # 107
Jordan, Peter (Austria): Trends in exonym use of European school atlases
Löfström, Jonas & Pansini, Valeria (France): Toponyms and cartography: Historical perspective and linguistic challenges
Mathias, Márcia (Brazil): The importance of the phonemes in the collection of geographical names in Brazil
Menezes, Paulo de, Almeida, Camila de & Freitas, Anniele de (Brazil): Toponymy of the political-administrative evolution of Rio de Janeiro State – Brazil
Resende, Ana, Santos, Cláudio dos, & Mathias, Márcia (Brazil): The riverhead of the Uruguai River: origins of a controversy
Santos, Claudio dos (Brazil): A new approach to the collection of geographical names in Brazil
Szyszkowska, Karolina & Przyszewska, Katarzyna (Poland): The national register of geographical names as part of a modern, consistent and reference spatial data infrastructure of Poland
Zaccheddu, Pier-Giorgio (Germany) & Overton, David (Belgium): EuroGeoNames (EGN) – The implementation of an INSPIRE service
The book can be ordered from the publisher Kovač, cf. to http://www.verlagdrkovac.de/978-3-8300-6700-9.htm
Name & Place
The new volume of Name & Place contains the toponymic proceedings of ICC Paris 2011. They can be called the first tangible result of the new Commission/WG.
A short history of the Journal Name and Place
In 1969 the Society Name and Place commenced publishing its annual “Journal”, which contains essays on various place-name topics. Most English counties are now covered in its place-name survey, however its early volumes are not as detailed as its later ones. From the 1960s there has been a change in the interpretation of some place-names, resulting from the detailed comparison of distributions of the place-name types which had been thought to be early Saxon and archaeological evidence.
There was originally also a bias towards interpreting names as Anglo-Saxon, and some have now been shown to be more likely Celtic. Kenneth Hurlstone Jackson advised on Celtic names.
By 2007 it had published 82 volumes of the county-by-county Survey of English Place-Names, aimed mainly at scholarly and academic users, and a range of books and booklets on names organized by region or by category (e.g. field-names), as well as some county dictionaries aimed mainly at a nonspecialist audience.
The Society is starting to publish a new series of booklets on placename elements, but it is likely to be some time before this is complete. The Survey has been consistently supported, morally and practically, by the British Academy, and from 2005 to 2010 was supported by a large grant from the Arts and Humanities Research Council.
English Place-Name Society material was used as the basis of the The Cambridge dictionary of English place-names published in 2004.