[Ads-l] of interest to someone here, perhaps?

[George Thompson]

>From a review in TLS of July 22, 2016 by Jonathan Dore, "deputy publishing
director of UCL IOE Press", of *THE OXFORD HANDBOOK OF NAMES AND NAMING*
<https://www.amazon.co.uk/s/?hidden-keywords=9780199656431&tag=nu0ab-21>*,
*Carole
Hough, editor, 800pp. Oxford University Press. £95 (US $155).

The most successful and engaging chapters are those that dig deepest. Julia
Kuhn on rural names reminds us that named natural features are not
restricted to large structures such as rivers and mountains, but can
encompass fields, clearings and copses, whose names can offer unique
information not recorded elsewhere. Richard Jones in his chapter on
archaeology provides just such an example - a Tudor field name near
Chichester, Fittenhalle ("fallen hall") whose meaning only became clear in
1960 when Fishbourne Roman palace was discovered in it. A different kind of
archaeology is evident in Alison Grant's chapter on lexicography, which
sets out what rich discoveries still await scholars using names to
reconstruct a now lost vocabulary of common nouns and adjectives that, in
millennia past, gave rise to them. Ean, galt, padduc and tige -
respectively lamb, pig, frog and goat - are all putative animal names in
Old English unattested in surviving texts but reconstructable from place
names. And among known vocabulary as well, a place name can provide
evidence that a constituent word was in use at a certain time, perhaps much
earlier than its earliest surviving appearance in the literature.
Ante-dating words - the attempt to find earlier instances than those
currently known - is one of the key aims of the third edition of the Oxford
English Dictionary, in progress since 2000 and now for the first time
finally getting to grips with onomastic sources.

​GAT​

-- 
George A. Thompson
The Guy Who Still Looks Stuff Up in Books.
Author of A Documentary History of "The African Theatre", Northwestern
Univ. Pr., 1998.

But when aroused at the Trump of Doom / Ye shall start, bold kings, from
your lowly tomb. . . .

L. H. Sigourney, "Burial of Mazeen", *Poems*.  Boston, 1827, p. 112

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