Richard Coates
| Richard Coates | |
|---|---|
| Born | 16 April 1949 Grimsby |
| Residence | Bristol |
| Citizenship | United Kingdom |
| Nationality | English |
| Fields | Linguistics |
| Institutions | University of the West of England, Bristol |
| Alma mater | University of Cambridge |
| Doctoral advisor | J.L.M. Trim |
| Known for | Historical linguistics Philology of northern and western European languages Onomastics, especially place-names |
Richard Coates (born 16 April 1949, in Grimsby) is an English linguist. He is professor of linguistics (alternatively professor of onomastics) at the University of the West of England in Bristol. He was formerly (1991–2006) professor of linguistics at the University of Sussex, where he served as Dean of the School of Cognitive and Computing Sciences from 1998 to 2003. He has been honorary director of the Survey of English Place-Names since 2003, having previously (1997–2002) served as president of the English Place-Name Society which conducts the Survey. From 2002 to 2008, he was secretary of the International Council of Onomastic Sciences, a body devoted to the promotion of the study of names. He was elected a fellow of the Society of Antiquaries in 1992 and of the Royal Society of Arts in 2001.
His main academic interests are proper names (from both the historical and the theoretical perspective), historical linguistics in general, the philology of northern and western European languages, regional variation in language, and local history. He is editor of the Survey of English Place-Names for Hampshire and principal investigator of the AHRC-funded project Family Names of the United Kingdom (FaNUK), of which Patrick Hanks is lead researcher.
He has written books on the names of the Channel Islands, the local place-names of St Kilda, Hampshire and Sussex, the dialect of Sussex, and, with Andrew Breeze, on Celtic place-names in England, as well as over 350 academic articles, notes, and collections on related topics. Some years ago, he introduced a new etymology of the name London. He derived it from the pre-Celtic Old European *(p)lowonidā, meaning 'boat river' or 'swim river', i.e. 'river too wide or deep to ford', and suggested that this was a name given to the part of the River Thames which flows through London; from this, the settlement gained the Celtic form of its name, *Lowonidonjon, by suffixation.[1]
He is also the author of Word Structure, a students' introduction to linguistic morphology, and of online resources on Shakespeare's character-names and place-names of Hayling Island.
Coates has often been cited as a lookalike of former The Velvet Underground singer Lou Reed, whom he shares a striking resemblance with.
[edit] See also
[edit] External links
- University of the West of England: Richard Coates, where a list of his main and recent publications can be found.
[edit] References
- ^ Coates, Richard (1998). "A new explanation of the name of London". Transactions of the Philological Society 96 (2): 203–229. doi:10.1111/1467-968X.00027. http://www.blackwell-synergy.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/1467-968X.00027.
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