Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 17, No. 407.
Centre for Computing in the Humanities, King's College London
www.kcl.ac.uk/humanities/cch/humanist/
www.princeton.edu/humanist/
Submit to: humanist@princeton.edu
Date: Tue, 25 Nov 2003 07:55:20 +0000
From: "Douglas Galbi" <Douglas.Galbi@fcc.gov>
Subject: name frequencies and the humanities
New communication and information technologies make it
much easier to compile, analyze, and share databases of
names. Personal names are highly valued linguistic
constructs. Moreover, since the beginning of written
history, historical records have preserved names. It
is worth considering analysis of names in humanistic
inquiry.
Consider, for example, the turmoil over Marian devotion,
and, more generally, word and image in sixteenth century
England. A popular response to the turmoil in sense
was an astonishing change in naming: across sixteenth
century England, the share of women named Mary rose from
less than 1% to about 10%.
This change seems to be related to the development
of theatre. In an important recent work, Stephen
Greenblatt argues that Shakespeare's theatre recreated
a cult of the dead. However, it seems to me that the
living presence so many persons continue to sense in
Shakespeare's characters points in a different direction.
Shakespeare, who had a mother and a grandmother named
Mary, but no sisters named Mary, was undoubtedly aware
of the "problem" of Mary. Appreciation for Mary in
popular sense in sixteenth-century England sheds new
light on Twelfth Night, and perhaps Shakespeare's theatre
more generally.
You can find discussion and relevant references to these
aspects of Shakespeare and sixteenth-century history in
Section IV of "Sense in Communication," freely available
at www.galbithink.org . Table 2, p. 99, and Appendix A,
pp. 175-7 document long-term historical trends in popularity
of the name Mary. The discussion of Twelfth Night is in
Section IV.C, pp. 100-110.
For more general research on trends in given names over
the past millennium, see "A New Account of Personalization
and Effective Communication," also available at
www.galbithink.org
I would welcome your thoughts and comments on this work
and its implications for understanding communication. Have
you considered analyzing name frequencies as part of your
work?
Douglas Galbi
Douglas.Galbi@fcc.gov
www.galbithink.org
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