scholarly journals “Enwau Prydeinig gwyn?” Problematizing the idea of “White British” names and naming practices from a Welsh perspective

2018 ◽  
Vol 14 (3) ◽  
pp. 251-259
Author(s):  
Sara Louise Wheeler

Our personal names are a potential source of information to those around us regarding several interconnected aspects of our lives, including our: ethnic, geographic, linguistic and cultural community of origin, and perhaps our national identity. However, interpretations regarding identifiably “White British” names and naming practices are problematic, due to the incorrect underlying assumption of a homogeneity in the indigenous communities of ‘Britain.’ The field of names and naming is a particularly good example of the wide linguistic and cultural chasm between the Welsh and English indigenous ‘British’ communities, and thus the generally paradoxical concept of “Britishness” in its wider sense. In this paper, I will explore names and naming practices which are particularly distinctive to a Welsh context, thus unearthing and opening up for wider debate the hidden diversity within the assumed and imposed category of “White British privilege.”

Literator ◽  
2013 ◽  
Vol 34 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Sihawukele Ngubane ◽  
Nompumelelo Thabethe

It is widely accepted that, in all societies, personal naming practices and culture are intertwined. Given that culture is not static, but dynamic and ever changing, personal names have undergone a major transformation due to socio-cultural and political factors. This article reflects on shifts and continuities in the practice of personal naming amongst the Zulu people. Emerging data demonstrate the evolution from pre-colonial Africa to the post-1994 period in South Africa. It is further illustrated that the reclaiming of indigenous names in the new democratic dispensation is perceived as a way for Africans to re-define and re-affirm their identities, thus de-stigmatising their culture. Ultimately, this article makes a strong argument that personal naming, in any society, is not detached from the socio-cultural environment. Rather, personal naming and culture are inextricably linked to socio-political conditions at any historical moment. This is demonstrated in the shift from personal naming practices greatly inspired by communal values to those steeped in contradictions within the epoch of neo-liberal capitalism. It is, therefore, concluded that shifts in people’s consciousness lead to fundamental shifts in personal naming practices.


2018 ◽  
Vol 23 ◽  
pp. 46-66
Author(s):  
Jaime Omar Salinas Zabalaga

This article discusses the film Vuelve Sebastiana (1953) by Jorge Ruiz, focusing on its ideological and aesthetic aspects. The analysis establishes connections between the idea of “nation” in the context of cultural transformation prompted by the economic and social policies of the National Revolution of 1952 and the way the Chipaya community is represented. The central argument is that "Vuelve Sebastiana" can be read not only in relation to the new national identity but as an expression of a new national imaginary regarding the indigenous communities of the Altiplano. The author proposes that "Vuelve Sebastiana" represents the nation through the temporal and spatial cartographies of a modern nation-building project, making visible some of its tensions and contradictions and allowing us to explore the imaginary that has redefined the relationship between the State and the indigenous communities of the Altiplano throughout the  second half of the 20th century.


1986 ◽  
Vol 64 (1) ◽  
pp. 84-87 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas P. Quinn ◽  
Graeme M. Tolson

To test the hypothesis that population-specific pheromones guide adult salmonids to their natal streams, juvenile and adult coho salmon (Oncorhynchus kisutch) were tested for chemosensory responses in two-choice tanks. Coho salmon from Quinsam and Big Qualicum rivers, British Columbia, Canada, distinguished their own population from the other. Tagging evidence indicates that straying between these two rivers and a third, geographically intermediate river seldom occurs. Thus, population-specific chemicals constitute a potential source of information for homing coho salmon, though their role vis-à-vis imprinted odors from other sources could not be evaluated.


Genealogy ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 29
Author(s):  
Giancarla Unser-Schutz

In pre-modern Japanese naming practices, familial relationships were frequently demonstrated systematically through personal names, but with changing lifestyles, family structures and naming trends, such systematic ways of creating familial ties through personal names have largely been lost. However, personal names may still express familial ties, but in different ways than in previous times. To consider this, this article utilizes a unique data set of 303 messages in municipal newsletters from parents about how they chose their child’s name, focusing on who was listed as choosing the name; whom the child was named for; and common elements within parent–child pairs and sibling sets. Parents themselves were most frequently noted to have selected the name, followed by the child’s older siblings; in comparison, grandparents were listed rarely. The use of a shared kanji ‘Chinese character’ between parents and children was also not common; however, it was more frequently observable in siblings’ names. Although the data set is small in size, the data strongly suggests that contemporary families are focused more on creating intragenerational connections between siblings, rather than intergenerational familial ties, which may be a result of the nuclearization of contemporary families.


Author(s):  
William Beezley

As Mexico’s minister of public education from 1921 to 1924, José Vasconcelos played a prominent role in efforts to create a new national identity expressing the 1910 Revolution’s goals of an inclusive society and equitable nation, opportunities created through education, and shared cultural expressions. Vasconcelos has been widely praised for his educational campaigns, especially in the countryside, among indigenous communities, and for his literacy programs in the city. According to these recent interpretations, his efforts as minister of public education have been both over- and underestimated. Nevertheless, the revolutionary national identity that he helped to foster with his discussion of mestizaje in La Raza Cósmica (The Cosmic Race; 1925) has since been ingrained into everyday life and culture.


1987 ◽  
Vol 39 (4) ◽  
pp. 675-700 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Walker

A word printed in lower-case letters has a characteristic shape as a result of the pattern created by its ascending, descending and neutral letters. The importance of word shape as a cue in word recognition, though debated for many years, has still to be satisfactorily resolved. On the assumption that the utility of a word's shape will depend on the extent to which it precludes all but a relative small set of candidate words, a promising approach to the issue compares reading performance for words with rare versus common shapes. As a prerequisite to this experimental approach, however, the distinctiveness of different word shapes needs to be determined. To this end, all of the three- to seven-letter words from the Kučera and Francis (1967) corpus were analysed. This revealed that although word shape in itself is rarely adequate to uniquely identify a word, when it is combined with knowledge of other orthographic features its potential utility is enhanced considerably. Examination of the distribution of letter types across letter positions within words revealed a potential source of information concerning word boundaries. It is suggested that this information may contribute to reading when, for example, the interword spacing is tight. The association of word-shape distinctiveness with a number of other word features is also reported.


2013 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 57-86
Author(s):  
GREGG CRANE

Recent scholarly comment on the relation between Ralph Waldo Emerson and William James offers an either–or choice between conflating the two thinkers in a proto-postmodern, antifoundationalist cast or dividing them into mutually exclusive categories of idealist believer and relativist skeptic. Contending that neither of these positions captures the pragmatist adumbrations in Emerson or the transcendentalist retentions in James, this essay turns to James's annotations of Emerson's writings as a singularly revealing yet largely neglected source of information about the exact nature of the Emerson–James connection. This evidence points to a pluralistic and distinctly literary formulation of intuitive insight as the key for opening up the Emerson–James relation and for framing it with a precision hitherto missing in discussions of these thinkers. The balance of the essay presents an analytic overview of the various aspects and implications of Emerson's and James's ideas of intuition. Combining doubt and belief, skepticism and faith, realism and idealism, a particular formulation of intuition is the answer that Emerson and James both offer to the problem of modernity—the problem of locating a source of value that is both of the self and beyond the self.


2020 ◽  
Vol 74 (4) ◽  
pp. 116-122
Author(s):  
G. Madiyeva ◽  
◽  
А. Kabytayeva ◽  

One of the most important national identification indicators is proper names, first of all, names of people (personal names, surnames) and geographical names (toponyms). Currently, there are new trends and directions in the study of onyms. In the context of cross-cultural communication, in the context of the functioning of different languages on the territory of multilingual Kazakhstan, onyms have undergone a number of semantic and structural changes. This article is devoted to the manifestation of the results of globalization and national identity in the modern architectural phenomenon – residential complexes of the city of Almaty. The article focuses on the onomastic identity realized through the names of modern housing complexes (oikodomonyms), which contain valuable and rich ethnolinguistic and historical information reflected in the language consciousness of the people. For this reason, oikodomonyms are qualified as names that make up one of the zones of active intercultural integration, which, performing the function of onomastic identity, can be conductors of national identity. As a result of the analytical review, the need for special attention to oikodomonyms as nominative units that contribute to the revival and preservation of national identity within the framework of the program "Rukhani zhangyru: preserve and increase" is identified and justified.


Author(s):  
Murray Pratt

Rather than offering a detailed analysis of the contents of the draft constitution, a consideration of the extent to which the EU is hampered in its ability to posit a counter-balance to the USAn Empire, or indeed a reflection on the economic and political ramifications of the document’s proposals, the aim of this article is to take a step back from the construction that is Europe, and pause to consider the Utopian assumptions about cultural identity which subtend the notion of union, as expressed within the draft constitution and more broadly across discourses about ‘Europeanness’ as shared destiny which underpin the European project. In order to do so, I draw on theories of national identity and belonging, at the same time interrogating the applicability of the national paradigm to that strange locality, the transnational, pan-regional, post-state, and potentially pre-federal entity which the EU is becoming. In the process, I offer readings of both the constitution, and a less official EU text, namely an online comic entitled ‘Captain Euro’ which was used to promote the single currency. I am particularly interested in investigating the narrativisation of culture and identity as a process of unification or union, and in opening up a space to consider the ideological imperatives which suture this master(ful) narrative. Slavoj Žižek’s theorisation of the moment of narrative possibility as one which occludes its own foundational basis is then considered as one which applies to a form of status denial inherent within the official European narrative of union, and through suggesting a queer reading of the Euroseminal myth of Zeus and Europa, I trace this Žižekian moment of ‘inherent transgression’ as a counter force undermining European cultural unification—paradoxically, perhaps queerly or strangely, a concomitant desire for the discrete and the separate, a drive towards distinction and difference which arises as a necessary complement to its signaled togetherness.


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