Personal names provide fascinating testimony to Babylonia's multi-ethnic society. This volume offers a practical introduction to the repertoire of personal names recorded in cuneiform texts from ...Babylonia in the first millennium BCE. In this period, individuals moved freely as well as involuntarily across the ancient Middle East, leaving traces of their presence in the archives of institutions and private persons in southern Mesopotamia. The multilingual nature of this name material poses challenges for students and researchers who want to access these data as part of their exploration of the social history of the region in the period. This volume offers guidelines and tools that will help readers navigate this difficult material. The title is also available Open Access on Cambridge Core.
Abstract The neutral model of cultural evolution, which assumes that copying is unbiased, provides precise predictions regarding frequency distributions of traits and the turnover within a ...popularity-ranked list. Here we study turnover in ranked lists and identify where the turnover departs from neutral model predictions to detect transmission biases in three different domains: color terms usage in English language 20th century books, popularity of early (1880–1930) and recent (1960–2010) USA baby names, and musical preferences of users of the Web site Last.fm. To help characterize the type of transmission bias, we modify the neutral model to include a content-based bias and two context-based biases (conformity and anti-conformity). How these modified models match real data helps us to infer, from population scale observations, when cultural transmission is biased, and, to some extent, what kind of biases are operating at individual level.
In several countries, one of the most pronounced trends in contemporary baby naming is selecting a comparatively uncommon name. Nevertheless, although a well-documented phenomenon, studies of ...uncommon name use are often limited to forenames. This study analyses approximately 22 million full names from England and 1 million from Wales, given between 1838 and 2014. It addresses the hypothesis that, consistent with the contemporary desire to choose an uncommon name, alliterative names - uncommon by definition - would become increasingly popular. More broadly, this study charts the long-term trends in alliterative naming over time. In both England and Wales, this pattern is consistent with a random expectation for much of the 19
th
century but declines significantly throughout the 20
th
century to its lowest use in the 1970s. This trend reverses towards the end of the 20
th
century, with alliterative naming becoming more common in contemporary records. These three aspects of alliterative name use are thematically referred to as 'ambivalence', 'avoidance' and 'appeal'; and may reflect changing attitudes towards alliterative naming. The relatively renewed appeal of alliterative names towards the end of the 20
th
century complements previous research on the preponderance of uncommon names and the contemporary 'need for uniqueness' in naming.
This dictionary contains data not only on the origins of French surnames in Québec and Acadia, a great many of which eventually spread to many parts of North America, but also on those which arrived ...in the United States directly from various French-speaking European and Caribbean countries. In addition to providing the etymology of the original surnames, it also lists the multifarious variants that have developed over the last four centuries. A unique feature of this work in comparison to other onomastics dictionaries is the inclusion of genealogical information on most of the Francophone migrants to this continent, something which has been rendered possible not only by the excellent record-keeping in French Canada since the very beginnings of the colony, but also through the explosion of such data on the internet in the last couple of decades. In sum, this dictionary serves the dual purpose of providing information on the meanings of French family names on the North American continent, as well as on the migrants who brought them there.
Apart from collective memories of lived experiences, much of the
modern world's historical sense comes from written sources stored
in the archives of the world, and some scholars in the
...not-so-distant past have described unlettered civilizations as
"peoples without history." In Praise of the Ancestors is a
revisionist interpretation of early colonial accounts that reveal
incongruities in accepted knowledge about three Native groups.
Susan Elizabeth Ramírez reevaluates three case studies of oral
traditions using positional inheritance-a system in which names and
titles are inherited from one generation by another and thereby
contribute to the formation of collective memories and a group
identity. Ramírez begins by examining positional inheritance and
perpetual kinship among the Kazembes in central Africa from the
eighteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries. Next, her analysis moves
to the Native groups of the Iroquois Confederation and their
practice of using names to memorialize remarkable leaders in the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Finally, Ramírez surveys
naming practices of the Andeans, based on sixteenth-century
manuscript sources and later testimonies found in Spanish and
Andean archives, questioning colonial narratives by documenting the
use of this alternative system of memory perpetuation, which was
initially unrecognized by the Spaniards. In the process of
reexamining the histories of Native peoples on three continents,
Ramírez broaches a wider issue: namely, understanding of the nature
of knowledge as fundamental to understanding and evaluating the
knowledge itself.
This note provides a road map for the use of the Social Security "Popular Baby Names" website. It gives information on how to navigate the site and utilize all of its features for research, decision ...making in the selection of a baby's name, personal information, and many other possibilities.
Abstract Almost by definition, “popular culture” reflects the effects of most people imitating those around them. At the same time, trends and fashions are constantly changing, with future outcomes ...potentially irrational and nearly impossible to predict. A simple null model, which captures these seemingly conflicting tendencies of conformity and change, involves the random copying of cultural variants between individuals, with occasional innovation. Here, we show that the random-copying model predicts a continual flux of initially obscure new ideas (analogous to mutations) becoming highly popular by chance alone, such that the turnover rate on a list of most popular variants depends on the list size and the amount of innovation but not on population size. We also present evidence for remarkably regular turnover on “pop charts”—including the most popular music, first names, and dog breeds in 20th-century United States—which fits this expectation. By predicting parametric effects on the turnover of popular fashion, the random-copying model provides an additional means of characterizing collective copying behavior in culture evolution.
It is not uncommon for place names to become symbols of national identity. Once in that position, such names often play a significant symbolic role in national and local politics. It is less common, ...however, for actual place name usage to significantly contradict declared place name preferences such that for official purposes people prefer a name variant that they do not use themselves. This article describes an instance of just such cognitive dissonance in a trilingual region in the Czech-Polish borderlands. As will be shown, arguments over which variant to use in this region have been marked by ongoing debates about multilingualism in the linguistic landscape. The parallel usage of the names Olše/Olza/Łolza for the local river shows how important place names can be in articulating national belonging in spite of actual place name usage. The analysis is based on the results of a survey conducted on a large population sample. The questionnaire results are supplemented by interviews and secondary literature.
Evolving social influence in large populations Bentley, R. Alexander; Ormerod, Paul; Batty, Michael
Behavioral ecology and sociobiology,
03/2011, Letnik:
65, Številka:
3
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Darwinian studies of collective human behaviour, which deal fluently with change and are grounded in the details of social influence among individuals, have much to offer "social" models from the ...physical sciences which have elegant statistical regularities. Although Darwinian evolution is often associated with selection and adaptation, "neutral" models of drift are equally relevant. Building on established neutral models, we present a general, yet highly parsimonious, stochastic model, which generates an entire family of real-world, right-skew socioeconomic distributions, including exponential, winner-take-all, power law tails of varying exponents, and power laws across the whole data. The widely used Barabási and Albert (1999) Science 286: 509-512 "B-Á" model of preferential attachment is a special case of this general model. In addition, the model produces the continuous turnover observed empirically within these distributions. Previous preferential attachment models have generated specific distributions with turnover using arbitrary add-on rules, but turnover is an inherent feature of our model. The model also replicates an intriguing new relationship, observed across a range of empirical studies, between the power law exponent and the proportion of data represented in the distribution.
PDF
