ICA course on Toponymy

Giving names to future objects in reclaimed areas (polders or newly opened up areas such as in the tropical forests of Brazil or Indonesia.

E1. Names in reclaimed polder areas

For new polders, reclaimed from the sea in the Netherlands, names were adapted that referred to former settlements that disappeared into the sea through storms and inundations in the Middle Ages, taking account of changes in spelling that reflect changes in pronunciation of the language and language development since the Middle Ages. In figure below, in the Noordoostpolder area, reclaimed in the 1940s, the name

Emmeloord refers to the village named Emeloirt ( lost to the sea in 1650).

Bant refers to a village Bantega, inundated in 1700.

Marknesse has been named after a village Marcnesse or Marenesse, a village that according to the chronicles once was situated between the islands Urk and Schokland.

Creil has either been named after a sand bank in the former Zuiderzee at Staveren, or after the Creiler Woud (forest).

Espel used to be a village name as well, once situated east of Urk. It also occurs under the names Espelbergh and Espelo.

Kraggenburg derived its name from the former port in the mouth of the IJssel river; the lighthouse of this port, formerly situated at the end of a pier, is now part of the new polder.

Luttelgeest was named after a village once situated next to Kuinre.

Nagele refers to the name of a bank on which fishermen tore their nets, as this was the place of the inundated ruins of the village Nagele (on old maps Naghele or Nakala) located once between Urk and Schokland lag.

Rutten is derived from the name Ruthne, a village located north of Urk in the 14th century.

Tollebeek used to be a village close to Urk, before it disappeared into the sea.

Names in an area newly reclaimed from the sea
(Noordoostpolder, the Netherlands)

Other examples of language planning

E2)Language planning in transmigrasi projects, Indonesia

In Indonesia, the surplus agrarian population of Java is resettled in less densely inhabited islands, like Sumatra, Borneo, Celebes or New Guinea. This supervised migration process is termed 'transmigrasi' locally. Here is a text that shows some considerations for naming the new settlements: in the Lampung area in Southern Sumatra) that had to be cleared first in the dense tropical forests (Benoit and Pain, 1989) :

"The present-day Kecamatan of Trimurjo bears witness to this heroic past. In 1935, 'Kolonisatie' was implemented; the program was so successful that the Japanese, who were seeking any means of supplying their troops, decided to continue it after the Dutch Indies surrendered on March 9, 1942. Toponymy has provided a grasp of the environment, the difficulties and the hopes of the settlers. Simbarwaringin and Limanbenawi indicate a heavily forested environment: simbar signifies "two"and waringin means "banyan"; liman "elephant" and benawi "swamp". Other toponyms indicate the settlers'desperate hopes: Depokrejo means "the agreeable and lively place to live"; Adipura can be translated as "the safest place". Finally, some names evoke the difficult installation cionditions: Trimurjo means "three canals" (located at the junction of three secondary canals); Purwodadi, "the village being built".

E3) Language planning at the colonisation frontier in Brazil

Figure below, shows the first subdivision of Brazil in the 16th century, in 15 captaincies, nearly all with religious names, a few only have Tupi names, like Itamaraca, Pernambuco and Ceara. After this first layer of colonist names, on the coast, with mainly Portuguese religious and descriptive names, the exploration of the interior gradually started, by the mixed descendants of the Portuguese and the Tupi Indians, who spoke the Tupi language. In the 18th century the Tupi language was banned, although it kept being spoken unto the middle of the 19th century in some states. By then this second layer of names, generated by these explorers in the native Tupi languages, had chrystallized.

The third layer was one of Portuguese names: In the 18th century inland exploration of the present state Minas Gerais started. Here minerals were found and mined, and towns developed, named accordingly: Diamantina, Minas de Rio de Contas, Minas Novas are examples. This urbanised colonisation started in 1711 with Vila Rica de Ouro Preto, followed by São João Del Rei (1713), and São José do Rio das Mortes (1717).
For other inland areas colonists from Europe or from the Azores islands were attracted - especially in the south where these settlements were also set up in order to back Portugal's claim to this area in border disputes with Spain. Apart from the Tupi name Curitiba, most placenames given in this colonisation drive were Portuguese, like Florianópolis (1675), Rio Grande (1736), Porto Alegre (1742) and others, and helped keep Southern Brazil firmly under Portuguese control.

Portuguese map (1574) by Luís Teixeira,
showing the location of the hereditary captaincies of Brazil.

Likewise in the second half of the 18th century there was a systematic policy of regional occupation through the constitution of a network of cities or villages named after cities back in Portugal: Chaves, Abrantes, Braganca, Obidos, Belmonte. Jesuit settlements with their indigenous names lost not only the Jesuits when the Societas Jesu was disbanded in Brazil in 1767 but also their names, as they were rebaptised ( Nova Almeida, Vila Flor, Trancoso are examples),

Nowadays the occurrence of Tupi toponyms in the various Brazilian states does not necessarily reflect the influence of the indigenous population or of Tupi-speaking explorers in the naming processes. It only shows that these names have Tupi etymology, but in fact they may have been given by non-Tupi speaking officials. Bustamante (2005) has shown that preference for providing administrative territorial units with names of Tupi origin was stimulated in the period 1930-1945 when Getúlio Vargas was president, and a broad toponymic change was promoted due to the so-called Geographical Law of Estado Novo (New State). Aiming at the systemic ordering of the Brazilian administrative and territorial division, the federal government approved this Law in 1938. Besides prohibiting the repetition of names of towns and districts, it recommended "the preference to adopt regional names of the regional native language or related to historical facts of the region in case of replacement of toponyms" (IBGE, 1943, p. 436).

More recently, this tendency is still alive; it is for instance visible in a recommendation included in the laws of the National System of Nature Conservation Unit (Law n. 9.985, dated 18th July 2000 and Decree n. 4.340, dated 22nd August 2002) to give preference to names of Indian ancestors in the choice for the designation of federal conservation units. According to article 3, "the denomination of each conservation unit should be based, preferably, on its most significant natural feature, or on its oldest denomination, giving priority, in this case, to the designations of the Indian ancestors" (2004, p.37).