War Is Fearful: The Recollection of War Memories Through Personal Naming Practices in Southeastern Nigeria

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

Title: The war is fearful: The Recollection of War memories through naming practices in South-eastern Nigeria

Introduction

The paper touches on an area of study that not much has been reported about academically, especially in Africa, despites so many war-conflicts that resulted in many people being displaced from their location.

The author/s uses naming practices to capture the effects of war called Nigeria-Biafran war, that took place between 1967-1970. Many people were killed. So, people in this region used naming strategies as a strategy to cope with the war-aftermath. Five themes were developed from the collected data set.

Socio-onomastic theory was used successfully to undergird the study and applied succinctly in the discussion of the findings. Personal naming relates to the society, so, the data used in this study reflect people's feelings and perceptions about the effects of war, as war disrupt people's well-being. And when was over, people use naming practice to reflect of the histories of their lives.

Each theme was properly discussed and supported with relevant dataset, and they resonate with the reviewed literature, together with the chosen theoretical framework.

The conclusion is well written as it shows how the aim and objective of the study was achieved. The author/s has shown how these people used personal names as representations of memories about the effects of war. 

In conclusion, the paper should be refined a bit, especially, grammar and references and citations and be accepted for publication, as it adds on the scarce onomastic knowledge regarding personal naming as sites of remembrances, as there is a lot on toponymy in this regard compared to personal naming.

 

I suggest that some old sources, such as 1980-1999, be avoided unless they are on the theoretical framework.

The grammar needs some improvement. References and citations need review.

Comments for author File: Comments.pdf

Comments on the Quality of English Language

Title: The war is fearful: The Recollection of War memories through personal naming practices in South-eastern Nigeria

I suggest that some old sources such as 1980-1999, be avoided unless they are on the theoretical framework.

The grammar needs some improvement. References and citations need review.

Author Response

Kindly see the attached word file.

 

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 2 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

I found this to be a very interesting and engaging paper. The study is a valuable and original contribution to scholarship, and presents original findings based on field research. The paper is well-contextualised, and is placed within relevant scholarly and theoretical frames.

My only significant suggestions are (aside from some attention to expression/English language as outlined below):

• p. 7 where discussing the methods employed, to include some more information on what the 'categorial frames' are. The sub-sections that follow are called 'tropes' at the end of the paper. A revision to check all terminology for consistency and clarity would be helpful.
• Lengthy paragraphs at time inhibit clarity and ease of reading. See esp paragraph one of the Literature review section.
• I think the conclusion could be stronger and while ending with a nod to future research is fine, these examples could perhaps be expanded for context or perhaps don't have the examples as the final sentence.
• References to 'this participant' 'a participant' etc is not always helpful. Could the participants be given numbers (small number of participants so could be numbered or given letters) this would help to clarify differences between participants for the reader. Given range of ages of participants and both men and women, it would have been really interesting to know some more about the individual participants, such as age and gender. Maybe too much for this paper, but were there any differences between participants (potentially based on age and gender) in terms of perspectives?

Comments on the Quality of English Language

Some improvements are needed - there are a number of typographical errors and some awkward expression/choice of words. This is fairly minor, but some further editing and polishing would be very helpful. Note also my point about breaking up paragraphs for greater ease of reading and clarity.

Author Response

Kindly see the attached file.

Author Response File: Author Response.docx