Abstract:Toponym is certain name of a natural or human geographic entity of specific space locations. As the product of human activity, the formation of a toponym has profound geographical, historical and cultural background, not only reflecting historical period and the reality of the natural geographical features, but also recording numerous cultural landscape information including national prosperity, social change, economic production, military activities. This paper aims to analyze geographic names in Zhongwei County from the perspectives of the names' character frequency, origin and cultural landscape carries with quantitative method and mathematical statistics method. The authors adopt GIS technology to establish a spatial database of toponyms of Zhongwei county and analyze with ArcGIS Spacial Statistics ToolBox and Analysis Toolbox. The results show that the toponym cultural landscape indicates the natural environment characteristics of middle temperate zone continental climate and the Yellow river, also implicates its particular frontier culture, migration culture and dialect culture. From the perspective of space, the toponym cultural landscape reveals that the density of toponym has positive correlation with the distribution of population density. The distribution of landscape toponyms is consistent with the topography. Toponyms which containe hill, ditch, spring and well widely distribute in Xiangshan Mountain, Wei Ning Kitayama and the Tengger Desert. The toponyms which contain beach, canal, lake, and bridge extensively distribute in the Yellow River alluvial plain. The distribution of military toponyms are closely related to the Great Wall. The military toponyms along the Ming Great Wall are more than other areas because many toponyms derive from the ancient defense work and facilities in Zhongwei county. The distribution of dialect place names has the negative correlation with transport. The toponym of townships in Xiangshan Mountain preserve the folk dialect features because that the natural condition is poor; the transport is not convenient; the rural residential place is small; and it is away from the administrative center.
李建华, 米文宝, 冯翠月, 杨显明. 基于GIS的宁夏中卫县地名文化景观分析[J]. 人文地理, 2011, 26(1): 100-104.
LI Jian-hua, MI Wen-bao, FENG Cui-yue, YANG Xian-ming. AN ANALYSIS ON TOPONYM CULTURAL LANDSCAPE BASED ON GIS APPLICATION IN ZHONGWEI COUNTY, NINGXIA MUNICIPALITY. HUMAN GEOGRAPHY, 2011, 26(1): 100-104.