Elizabethan Society and Its Named Places
1973; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 63; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês
10.2307/213942
ISSN1931-0846
Autores Tópico(s)Geographies of human-animal interactions
ResumorT HE study of the origin of place names can be a marvelous key to residuals in cultural landscapes, as geographers have long recognized. Some years ago Ivan Lind wrote an entertaining essay on the two main problems inherent in onomastics: the interpretation of the place names and the conformance of place names to geographical reality.1 I would like to delve more deeply into etymology and pose the question, Why name things at all? By changing the emphasis from What's in a name? to What is a name? my concern shifts from the anachronistic existence of place names in a landscape to the acceptance of naming as a universal human activity. For example, the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, when Englishmen were overly concerned with place names, have been either ignored or dismissed in the history of geography. How should the serious geographer interpret these passages by William Camden and Richard Carew?
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