Last week I had the privilege to participate in a colloquium again. The topic was place names identification in Mendes Pinto's travels.


This is a synopsis:

"We present here our current work on a positivist analysis of place names. It aims to be valuable for either a literary reading or a more strict historical and geographical interpretation of Pinto's work. We sketch three methods to trace a place name.

1) Through phonetic analysis, does a given place name match a geographical entity in an Asian language?

2) By examining context, do we find historical, ethnographic, topographic, architectural, any descriptive features to relate the place name to a particular geographical area?

3) Given a point of reference and a vector of displacement, is it possible to solve the place name through cartography? "


A pdf file with slides is available here.