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II. Historical Research and Literature Review
2.1 Historical Research
From the late nineteenth century, many studies about the relationship between American place names and their cultural implications have been conducted. Though there are different opinions among different scholars, it is all agreed that American place names and their culture are closely related. Robert Stevenson has said, there was no place named galore, poetically, humorously and gracefully as America; all eras, nations and their languages contributed to American place names.
William Bright was an American linguist who specialized in Native American and South Asian languages as well as descriptive linguistics. In 2001, he assembled a team of twelve editorial consultant experts in Native American languages and many other Native contributors to prepare lexicon of eleven thousand place names along with their etymologies. In 2004, he published Native American Place names of the United States, in which he argued that American place names derived from American Indian languages. This book is an ambitious and illuminating compendium. It is the culmination of many decades of collaborative linguistic research on the Native origins of geographic place names in the continental United States and Alaska, and the first collection of its kind to cover forty-nine of the fifty states. The names are derived primarily from the Geographical Names Information System (USGS 2002), but Bright skillfully extends the scope of the collection to include names that readers are likely to encounter in everyday life - in American Indian natives, on roadmaps and signs, and in popular cultural sources such as magazine stories and movies. (Bright)
Su Xiaoyu held that place name is a social phenomenon. It is not only a product of conflicts in human society, but also a word signal of language given by human for the geographical entities based on their observations, acknowledgement and needs. In 1997, Su Xiaoyu published an article, Analysis of the Cultural Implications of American Place Names, which stated that the origin of American place names enjoyed rich resources, including historical backgrounds, religious belief, life styles, conventional customs, social conditions, thinking models and language constructions. He pointed out that the research on the American place names could contribute not only to our understanding of the American language itself, but also to our acknowledgement of cultural implications that conveyed by the American place names, which would make us gain a critical understanding of American history and its future. (Su)
In 2002, Dai Weiping put forward that the origin of American place names is closely bound up with the American culture in a wide range. American place names are influenced by many factors as follows: colonial history, cultural heritage, ecological environment, Bible and ancient Greek and Roman culture, immigrant culture and major historical events and prominent persons. He believed that a deep and deliberate exploration on the origin of American place names would be helpful for us to apprehend the ethnic features, cultural characteristics and the history of development of the American culture. (Dai and Zhou)
There are also other abundant researches on this topic both in China and foreign countries. In 2009, The U.S. State Names: Stories of How Our States Were Named, written by Kathy Guyton, was published, which pointed out that the American place names are living fossil of American culture and history. And Pan Yi put forward that the research on American place names can help people understand the backgrounds, historical activities and values of America. Another scholar, Zhou Dingguo, pointed out that historical personalities had a huge influence on the naming of American place names.