Pompey, nickname for Portsmouth

[Lynne Murphy]

I saw Trevor Burnard speak about slave names in the West Indies--which
often involved classical references.  Presumably this article of his
discusses this:

"Slave Naming Patterns: Onomastics and the Taxonomy of Race in
Eighteenth-Century Jamaica," The Journal of Interdisciplinary History,
XXXI:3 (Winter, 2001), 325-46.

Lynne

--On Monday, December 11, 2006 2:45 pm -0500 "Joel S. Berson"
<Berson at ATT.NET> wrote:

> At 12/11/2006 10:29 AM, you wrote:
>> Pompey may have been a common slave name in the US.
>
> Probably was.  One might look at:
>
> * Greene, Lorenzo J[ohnston]. “The New England
> Negro as Seen in Advertisements for Runaway
> Slaves”. The Journal of Negro History, Vol. 29, No. 2 (Apr., 1944),
> 125?146.
>
> and the index in:
>
> * Greene, Lorenzo Johnston. The Negro in Colonial
> New England, 1620?1776. New York: Columbia
> University Press, 1942. Reprint: with a new
> preface by Benjamin Quarles. New York: Atheneum, 1969.
>
> It was also one of the three names used by
> Hawthorne in "Old News I" to epitomize slaves --
> "But, without venturing a word in extenuation of
> the general system, we confess our opinion that
> Caesar, Pompey, Scipio, and all such great Roman namesakes, ..."
>
> Joel



Dr M Lynne Murphy
Senior Lecturer and Head of Department
Linguistics and English Language
Arts B135
University of Sussex
Brighton BN1 9QN

phone: +44-(0)1273-678844
http://separatedbyacommonlanguage.blogspot.com

------------------------------------------------------------
The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org