| As an effective means adopted by the local governments and ethnic minorities for something significant,place names have become an expressive symbol of path for political power and ethnic cultures.Generalized and conceptualized place names in ethnic languages not only contain their own structures and relations,but also embody multi-dimensional information such as multiple histories and cultures.They are important components of intangible cultural heritages and "living fossils" of ethnic minorities.Place names with affluent information,however,keep disappearing in the process of globalization and modernization,with elimination of ethnic boundaries.From the perspective of toponymy,geography and linguistics,this study focuses on toponym languages,ethnic cultures,and spatial distribution and evolution,It plays an important role in the inheritance,protection and development of toponym in ethnic languages.Due to the marginalization of geographical names and the limitations of researchers' academic background,especially those in the study of toponymy in minority languages,geographers and geomorphology researchers are confined to the deconstruction and evolution of toponymy space.Most of them are studies on one-dimensional in single languages.Multi-dimensional cultural information of multi-language geographical names calls for interdisciplinary interpretation and deconstruction.Intervention of linguistics is urgently needed in the study of place names in Chinese characters or in minority languages without detailed historical records.In the process of modernization,the number of place names is increasing,and at the same time,the names of different languages are changing,taking different directions of evolution.Therefore,from an interdisciplinary and multidimensional perspective,this paper studies the linguistic relationship,spatial distribution,ethnic relationship and evolution law of ethnic names in an ethnic minority area,excavates its historical resources of harmonious development,reveals the uniqueness and diversity of ethnic cultures,and explores their lexical structures,spatial distributions,evolution,and driving factors for the changes of regional place names.It aims to serve the development of geographical names and the inheritance of local cultures in the border ethnic area.With a mutual reference to the Chinese place names,Hani place names and Dai place names in local literature,this paper makes an attentive exploration on the lexical structure of multilingual place names,their spatial distribution,evolution and driving factors.It makes a detailed study of their humanistic and natural implications,and their subclass classification in Mojiang Hani Autonomous County with an interdisciplinary and comprehensive method.It is pointed out that the evolution of multilingual place names is dominated by the convergence of Chinese place names and the coexistence of other differences.Making an investigation of the gradual disappearance of some ethnic language names in the process of modernization,this paper comes to the following major conclusions:(1)The rich structural types of multilingual toponym words reflect the diversity and blending of regional ethnic cultures and their mountainous natural environment.The proper and generic names of toponym names can be transformed into each other.The feature of “collective residences in dispersed areas” results in an integration of ethnic cultures in a convergent and complementary way.The multilingual place names of Mojiang County are mainly in Chinese with a supplement of minority language place names,indicating typical features of the local Chinese dialects in Yunnan.Some place names in Hani and Dai languages refer to different places with the same names and homonyms,and the disyllabic phenomenon of Hani place names still remain significant.Chinese and Dai place names are mostly humanistic,while Hani place names are mostly natural toponym.In the evolution of multilingual toponym,place names in the ethnic languages still form the bottom language and remain in modern toponym.(2)The kernel density distribution of Hani,Dai,Chinese humanistic and natural geographical names is mainly based on the core-edge structure,in a multi-core and banded distribution.The central part of the county is the main distribution area of Dai language place names while the southeast of the county is that of Hani language toponym.The southwest of the county is the main distribution area of Chinese toponym.The spatial distribution of toponym is consistent with the distribution of ethnic population in the county.The distribution of kernel density of subclass names of humanities and nature in ethnic languages is unbalanced.The spatial distribution of multi-lingual toponym after classification reveals overlaps and differences.The multi-lingual place names reveals mosaic distribution in Mojiang Hani Autonomous County,displaying a higher tendency from the east to the west.(3)Before the year 1949,in the evolution process of multi-lingual toponym in the county,Chinese toponym are always the main ones.The educational thoughts contained in the toponym are encoded in a decreasing order from high to low,and the number of multi-lingual toponym is on the increase.Since then the number of place names in ethnic languages has undergone a rapid growth,since the naming system became more independent for the local governments and people.The multi-lingual toponym spread from north to south although the new toponym were concentrated in the central part of the county.They expanded from high-altitude mountainous areas to low-altitude areas along the traffic arteries,and the distribution of multilingual place names has changed from intenser in the east to the opposite.Affected by multiple factors such as Chinese culture,economy,science and transportation,Hani and Dai geographical names disappear and decrease.(4)Through an analysis of buffer areas along the traffic arteries,combined with the geographical structure of mountain dams and the evolution of geographical names,it is found that traffic,population,ethnic economy,ethnic language,historical memory of multi-ethnic symbiotic development,political power evolution,economic development,system and policy regulation,and ethnic cultural mixture has led to the continuous evolution of multilingual geographical names in the county.This paper studies the lexical structure,spatial distribution and evolution of multilingual place names in Mojiang Hani Autonomous County,on the basis of an interdisciplinary perspective,with qualitative and quantitative analyses such as mathematical statistics,language analysis,GIS spatial analysis and other theoretical methods.It aims to provide a referential sample for the study of multilingual place names in the country's border ethnic areas. |
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