Search more than 2 million place names for Scotland, England and Wales (1888-1913)

History Scotland


A new gazetteer from the National Library of Scotland allows website visitors to search for places or other written text on detailed maps.

This is the first time that names from historic Ordnance Survey six-inch-to-the-mile maps can be searched and it is all thanks to the success of the recent GB1900 transcription project.

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The new gazetteer allows users to type a chosen place name into a search box. Suggested place names are instantly presented and when you select a name you are then taken to its place on the map.
Parish and county names have been added to make the names easier to tell apart and to provide locational context.

Explore the website.

Scottish Place-Name Society's Spring Conference

Scottish Place-Name Society

DAY CONFERENCE & AGM, 5 MAY 2018, PERTH

The Society’s spring conference and AGM will be held at Perth Museum in Perth. Offers of papers are welcome. A title and short abstract should be sent to the Convener by 4 December 2017: carole.hough@glasgow.ac.uk

Scottish Place-name Society's Autumn Conference

http://www.snsbi.org.uk/pdf/SNSBI_Newsletter_13.pdf

Scottish Place-name Society

Comann Ainmean-Aitie na H-Àlba


Autumn Conference, 5 November, 2016, at the University of Edinburgh 


The SPNS autumn conference will be themed on special interests of Bill Nicolaisen.


Details TBC with the autumn newsletter. http://www.spns.org.uk/

http://www.spns.org.uk/bill-nicolaisen-memorial-conference/

BILL NICOLAISEN MEMORIAL CONFERENCE

10.00 Registration and coffee
10.30 Introduction and Opening Remarks

Session 1:
10.50 Margaret Mackay: Remembering Bill11.20 Sheila Mary Young: The Route Names of Lochnagar11.50 Alison Grant: From Onomasticon to Lexicon: Place-Names and Personal Names in the vocabulary of the Scots Language12.20 Arne Kruse: Laithlind – Back to Scandinavia?

13.00-14.00 Lunch

Session 2:
14.00 Peder Gammeltoft: Place-Name Typologies – Just Dots on Maps?14.30 Martin Danielsen: Nicolaisen and Place-Name Explanatory Elements in Legends15.00 James Butler: Features, Folklore and Fantasies: the Onomastic Artistry of Arthur Ransome’s Lake District

 5 minute break

Session 3:
15.35 Jacob King: The Semantic Structure of Scottish Hydronymy: Fifty years on16.05 Peter Kitson: On Relating “Old European” River-Names to Models of the Indo-European Expansion4.45 Closing Remarks

Please book well in advance so we can finalise numbers for lunch preferably return the tear-off slip by November 1st. Late applications, after that date, should confirm with Leonie Dunlop on 07732835576.

____________________________________________________________________

Please reserve me ___ places with lunch at the November 5th SPNS conference in Edinburgh.

Name (please print) _______________________________________________________

Address _______________________________________________________________

Email OR phone no. _______________________________________________________

Please send this tear-off slip with cheque payable to SPNS (£20 per person, or £10 if full-time student), to:

Alison Grant (SPNS), c/o SLD, 25 Buccleuch Place (Basement), Edinburgh EH8 9LN.

Traditional names fall in number as Scotland becomes more multicultural

http://www.scotsman.com/news/traditional-names-fall-in-number-as-scotland-becomes-more-multicultural-1-4104972

Smith, Brown and Wilson have registered the highest numbers since analysis began back in 1975.

http://www.dailyrecord.co.uk/news/scottish-news/traditional-scottish-surnames-dying-out-1886291#QRZFk0W4I6QWyox8.97

But their numbers are dwindling as Scotland’s multicultural makeup starts to emerge through recorded Births, Deaths and Marriages - and recorded births continue to fall.

In 2015, Smith remained the most common name in Scotland with 1,929 instances noted on official records of major life events. The reign of the Smiths is could be ending though, and last year it was recorded on 790 fewer records than it was 40 years earlier.

The numbers of Browns are also falling, with 1,438 life records bearing the name last year – down 532 on the 1975 figure. Wilsons too saw their number fall, from 1,886 40 years ago to 1,352 last year - down 534.

The National Records of Scotland have recorded trends in surnames every five years since 1975.
After Smith, Brown and Wilson, there have been five other names consistently taking spots four to eight.

They are Stewart, Thomson, Robertson, Campbell and Anderson. Of these, only Stewart and Thomson were more common last year than they were in 1975.

Professor Carole Hough, Professor of Onomastics at Glasgow University, said most surnames came from a place, an occupation, a relationship, or a characteristic.

Campbell, which originates from Argyll, could fall into the latter category and is drawn from the two Gaelic words Cam and Beal, which when used together translate as crooked mouth.
She added that the age of some names, such as Murray - from Moray - and very common professions - such as blacksmith - led to “multiple occurrences” of surnames, such as Smith.
Professor Hough said: “Surnames from place-names, as with Murray, from Moray in Scotland, are among the oldest, so they have had time to become well established and to spread.
“Some occupations, such as smith, were very common, so they have given rise to multiple occurrences of the same surname.

“However, the occupation had to be sufficiently distinctive to identify individual people – if it were too common, it wouldn’t serve that purpose. There would probably be one smith in every village, but only one.
“Some personal names, such as William, Thomas, Robert, Andrew and Donald, were very common during the time when surnames were evolving, so they gave rise to multiple occurrences of William’s son, Thomas’s son, Donald’s son.”


Read more: http://www.scotsman.com/news/traditional-names-fall-in-number-as-scotland-becomes-more-multicultural-1-4104972#ixzz472umg0DL

Doctoral Studentship at the University of Glasgow: Protocols for the use of name evidence in lexicography

http://www.jobs.ac.uk/job/ALF983/ahrc-collaborative-doctoral-studentship-protocols-for-the-use-of-name-evidence-in-lexicography/


 

AHRC Collaborative Doctoral Studentship with Scottish Language Dictionaries

Protocols for the use of name evidence in lexicography: comparative analysis of onomastic and non-onomastic data for historical and contemporary Scots

Applications are invited for a PhD at the University of Glasgow offered under the AHRC CDA programme with Scottish Language Dictionaries, Edinburgh.

The studentship will be based at the University of Glasgow and will be co-supervised by Professor Carole Hough and Dr Wendy Anderson (Glasgow) and Dr Alison Grant (Scottish Language Dictionaries). Training will be provided by both the University of Glasgow and Scottish Language Dictionaries in their respective areas of expertise. The studentship is funded for three years to commence in October 2015 and covers tuition fees at the Home/EU rate. Home students and EU students who have lived in the UK for 3 years prior to the start date of the award will also receive a maintenance bursary (stipend) of £14,057 (2015/16 RCUK rate).

About the research
Dictionaries have traditionally used written texts as sources of evidence. The first edition of the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), like A Dictionary of the Older Scottish Tongue and The Scottish National Dictionary, relied heavily on volunteer readers; present-day lexicographers have access to large text corpora, online archives and the internet. Corpora such as the Scottish Corpus of Texts & Speech, with a spoken component, also provide evidence of colloquial lexis for dictionaries of contemporary language. For historical dictionaries, this type of material is unavailable, but sources of non-literary data include personal names and place-names.

The increasing use of name evidence is a major trend in current lexicography. Most names originate as descriptions, and preserve lexical evidence that may predate or otherwise extend information from other sources. Birchin Lane in London derives from an unrecorded Middle English *berdcherver ‘beard-cutter, barber’; the surname Kibbler predates the earliest citation in the OED for kibbler ‘grinder’. This type of material was largely overlooked by early lexicographers, and is providing new words, as well as new meanings and antedatings of known words, for ongoing projects such as the 3rd edition of the OED and the 2nd edition of the Concise Scots Dictionary. Since many names originate in speech, these discoveries are generally taken to represent colloquial lexis, but that assumption has not yet been tested.

Ironically these developments have coincided with a trajectory of research in name studies which has identified significant differences between uses of terms in names and in ordinary language. Work on so-called ‘onomastic dialects’ initially focused on pre-historic and historic languages, establishing that the lexicon and onomasticon split off at an early stage of Indo-European before developing along similar but not identical lines. Further work has revealed a continuing divide between onomastic and lexical registers up to the present day, e.g. Norse-derived gata ‘street’ is still used in creating street-names, but is not part of ordinary language. Implications for the use of name evidence in dictionaries are far-reaching, but have not yet been explored.

This project will provide a more nuanced understanding of names as witnesses to vocabulary through a comparative analysis of uses of the Scots language in speech, written texts, and names of various kinds. The research focuses specifically on Scottish Language Dictionaries’ in-house Word Collection, which is used for producing and updating the dictionaries. There is flexibility for the student to select the types of names on which to focus, but it is expected that one case study will deal with street-names, the most productive area of the present-day onomasticon. Other case studies might deal with field-names, place-names, medieval personal names, or other types of names.

Candidates ideally should have:

• A high quality Honours degree (2:1 or above) in English Language or a related discipline.
• A strong Masters degree (Merit or Distinction) in English Language or a related discipline.
• Demonstrable knowledge of at least two of the following: Lexicography, Onomastics, Scots.
• Applicants should be able to demonstrate strong research capabilities and be fluent in spoken and written English.

Applications should include:

• A statement of no more than 1,000 words indicating what skills and experience you will bring to the project
• A current CV
• A transcript of qualifications to date (and anticipated results if you are still studying for your Masters)
• A writing sample (a full essay or Masters dissertation, up to 15,000 words)
• Two letters of recommendation

The deadline for applications is Monday 29 June 2015
Interviews will be held on Thursday 23 July 2015

For general enquiries: Carole.Hough@glasgow.ac.uk

Applications should be made via critstudies-pgscholarships@glasgow.ac.uk. Please make clear in your online application that you are applying for the Protocols for the use of name evidence in lexicography studentship.

Very Scottish names

http://namesorts.com/2014/07/11/very-scottish-names/

The NameSorts' team recently opened GendRE API to recognize the gender of international names. What makes it so accurate?

Let's find out: 

We recognize the cultural origin of international names, so we can tell that Andrea Rossini is most likely an Italian name (and a male name), whereas Andrea Parker is most likely an anglosaxon name (and a female name); 声涛周 is most likely a male ; “O. Sokolova” is most likely a female. Try those:

• http://api.namsor.com/onomastics/api/json/gendre/Andrea/Rossini
• http://api.namsor.com/onomastics/api/json/gendre/Andrea/Parker
• http://api.namsor.com/onomastics/api/json/gendre/Jean/Durieux
• http://api.namsor.com/onomastics/api/json/gendre/Jean/Allen

We’re continuously working on improving the accuracy of our software, for a particular country/region. This year, in August, the University of Glasgow will host the 25th International Congress of Onomastic Sciences, the premier conference in the field of name studies. So, how accurate is NamSor at recognizing Scottish names?

The following chart shows some backtesting results: how NamSor correctly or incorrectly classified ~3000 names that are labelled as Scottish in several databases (Freebase, WWI casualties) among one hundred other places/regions/cultures (from Ireland to Zimbabwe).

Also, this is a list of “Very Scottish” names coming from the software : craig docherty, alasdair macgregor, malcolm finlayson, alistair urquhart, rikki ferguson, scott shearer, scott taggart, craig strachan, james wedderburn, scott muirhead, bobby prentice, scott mcculloch, stuart munro, grant munro, alistair woodburn, deborah mccallum, hugh mackintosh, scott chisholm, bobby shearer, billy abercromby. Does they make sense? Feedback welcome.

We hope to make it even better, so we can produce interesting DataViz from Twitter or other cool databases/services.

Read further:

• Presentation of NamSor for migration studies (Turkish Migration Conference 2014)
• What’s in a Twitter name? Revealing the Irish, French, Indonesian digital diasporas