Talk by Dr. Alan Macniven:
Lunchtime: 12pm, Humanities Research Annexe (‘The Cabin’)
‘Creating context for medieval onomastics: Practical approaches to extra-linguistic analysis’
The names of places can be seen as short but tightly composed narratives with the capacity to preserve valuable information on the relationship between the landscape and the communities who have lived and worked on it. While the key to understanding a given name lies in the historical-philological analysis of its linguistic components, consideration of its extra-linguistic context can prove invaluable in the categorisation of name-types, user-groups and other associated phenomena. Today’s session will show how GIS programmes can be used to provide a practical frame for extra-linguistic analysis.