Birthday Greetings for Prof. Willy Van Langendonck

ICOS

Prominent linguist Willy Van Langendonck turned 80.

The ICOS board would like to express best wishes for an extraordinary onomastician. Happy birthday! We celebrate your gentle, strong, ever-enthusiastic, generous and practical-minded presence at each ICOS Congress among us, ever-so-long as we have this gift. Sincerely hope you have a nice birthday, and stay healthy, warm, and peaceful in this winter! Very best wishes for your happiness and wonderful achievements as ever.

Willy Van Langendonck is Professor Emeritus of general / Dutch linguistics and onomastics at the University of Leuven (Belgium). His research interests include grammatical categories, reference and proprial semantics, theory of proper names, system of modern (Flemish) personal names and bynames, etc. Professor has published widely on proper names (e.g. "Theory and Typology of Proper Names", Mouton de Gruyter, 2007). He was Editor-in-chief of Onoma (Journal of the International Council of Onomastic Sciences) and Secretary of ICOS from 1968 to 2002. Besides that, Professor Langendonck is Member of the Belgian Royal Committee for Toponymy & Dialectology since 1989.

Theory and Typology of Proper Names (by Prof. Van Langendonck)

www.familienaam.be/

Surname mapping website for Belgium:

www.familienaam.be/

Here, for instance, the map demonstrating the distribution of surname "VAN LANGENDONCK" in honour of the Professor Willy Van Langendonck

who published one of the great work on general onomastics of today (since 1970s!!!):

So, the map is charting in this way:

As you can see, there are only 456 persons with that family name. Mostly all of them are situated in the Northern Belgium, where they speak Dutch. Everything is logic!!!