Place Names: Approaches and Perspectives in Toponymy and Toponomastics

Description

What are place names? From where do they originate? How are they structured? What do they signify? How important are they in our life? This groundbreaking book explores these compelling questions and more by providing a thorough introduction to the assumptions, theories, terminology, and methods in toponymy and toponomastics - the studies of place names, or toponyms. It is the first comprehensive resource on the topic in a single volume, and explores the history and development of toponyms, focusing on the conceptual and methodological issues pertinent to the study of place names around the world. It presents a wide range of examples and case studies illustrating the structure, function, and importance of toponyms from ancient times to the present day. Wide ranging yet accessible, it is an indispensable source of knowledge for students and scholars in linguistics, toponymy and toponomastics, onomastics, etymology, and historical linguistics.

Francesco Perono Cacciafoco is an associate professor in linguistics at Xi'an Jiaotong-Liverpool University. Before joining XJTLU, he was a senior lecturer in historical linguistics at Nanyang Technological University. He works on the etymology of Indo-European place names, on the study of Aegean scripts, on cryptography, on language deciphering, and on language documentation. Francesco Cavallaro is an associate professor in linguistics at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. His research interests are in sociolinguistics and the social aspects of bilingualism, especially of minority groups in multilingual contexts.

'This book brings together ideas that conceptualise the practices of place naming. Grounded in a multidisciplinary fashion - from sociolinguistics to geography - this volume is innovative as it examines place names according to their relations with histories, cultures, and societies in order to understand their historical and linguistic origins as well as the role they play in people's everyday lives.' Remus Cretan, West University of Timisoara, Romania