ANALYSIS ON CULTURAL LANDSCAPE CHARACTERISTICS OF PLACE NAME IN GUANGDONG PROVINCE
WANG Bin1, HUANG Xiu-lian2, SITU Shang-ji3
1. College of Geographical Science, Fujian Normal University, Fuzhou 350007 China;
2. College of Arts, Fujian Normal University, Fuzhou 350007 China;
3. Center for Urban and Regional Studies, Sun Yat-sen University, Guangzhou 510275 China
Abstract Place name is certain name of a natural or human geographic entity of specific spatial locations. As the product of human activity, the formation of place names owns profound geographical, historical and cultural background, not only reflecting regional historical development and the reality of the natural geographical features, but also recording numerous cultural landscape information including local prosperity, social change, economic production and migration. The paper aims to analyze place names in Guangdong province from the perspectives of the place name groups, origins, dialects with grammars and cultural landscapes carrying with quantitative method and mathematical statistics method. The result shows that there are three place name sequent occupations obviously in Guangdong in the view of language structure, which are ancient Yue language gradation, local dialect layer including Cantonese, Hakka dialect and Holo language, and common gradation of the county. From the time point, place names in Guangdong province were essentially ancient Yue language names before Tang Dynasty, southern local dialects names from Song Dynasty to the first Qing Dynasty while northern written language names since the last Qing Dynasty. From the view of space, local dialect place name layers in Guangdong have came into being basically in the Song Dynasty while it was formed finally that the distribution of place name landscapes in Guangdong province was divided into three parts with Cantonese which mainly lies in the Pearl River delta and the west and southwest of Guangdong province, Hakka dialect mainly located the southeast, and Holo language mainly distributed in the east and northeast in the Qing Dynasty.
2012, Vol. 27 
