Vol. 64 No. 3 (2016)
Article

Antecedent Generics: How Capes, Lakes, Mounts, and Points Are Named in the Antipodes

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  • Jan Tent
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/00277738.2016.1197646

Published 2016-07-02

Keywords

  • Namesaking,
  • parental investment,
  • birth,
  • family,
  • Nebraska

Copyright (c) 2016 American Name Society

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Abstract

Toponymic literature often mentions that the names of geographic features generally have the structure: specific + generic. While this is often the case, there are a set of geographic features that regularly do not follow this sequence. These are capes, lakes, mountains, and points. Their order of elements is often the reverse: generic + specific. By using toponyms from the Gazetteer of Australia and the New Zealand Gazetteer, this article shows there is indeed a distinct and suggestive pattern to the names that these features bear, explores this phenomenon and attempts to discover reasons for this trend.

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