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Onomastics is the branch of lexicology which studies proper names of all kinds, history and the origins of names, from the Greek word onoma, `name'. Onomastics studies different kinds of names such as names of people (e.g. first names, middle names, surnames, nicknames), names of places (e.g. countries, districts, cities, towns, villages), names of landscape features (e.g. seas, rivers, streams, lakes, mountains, hills, valleys, forests, woods, moors, marshes), names of buildings (e.g. houses, churches, pubs, schools, airports, hotels, railway stations), names of routeways (e.g. roads, streets, paths, tracks, bridges, fords, canals, shipping routes), names of animals (e.g. pets, greyhounds, racehorses, cows), names of ethnic and social groups (e.g. nations, tribes, political parties, clubs, sports teams), names of events (e.g. competitions, fairs, races), names of astronomical features (e.g. planets, stars), names of vehicles (e.g. aircrafts, locomotives, ships), names of commercial products (e.g. chocolates, lipsticks, wines), names of creative works (e.g. books, films, plays, poems), names in fiction as well as in the real world – the list goes on and on.
Russian State University of Trade and Economics
Intercultural communication
Department of Foreign Lexicology
Onomastics
Made by: Nikityuk Natalia
IC-32
Checked by: Tupitsyna I.N.
Moscow
2013
Introduction
Onomastics is the branch of lexicology which studies proper names of all kinds, history and the origins of names, from the Greek word onoma, `name'. Onomastics studies different kinds of names such as names of people (e.g. first names, middle names, surnames, nicknames), names of places (e.g. countries, districts, cities, towns, villages), names of landscape features (e.g. seas, rivers, streams, lakes, mountains, hills, valleys, forests, woods, moors, marshes), names of buildings (e.g. houses, churches, pubs, schools, airports, hotels, railway stations), names of routeways (e.g. roads, streets, paths, tracks, bridges, fords, canals, shipping routes), names of animals (e.g. pets, greyhounds, racehorses, cows), names of ethnic and social groups (e.g. nations, tribes, political parties, clubs, sports teams), names of events (e.g. competitions, fairs, races), names of astronomical features (e.g. planets, stars), names of vehicles (e.g. aircrafts, locomotives, ships), names of commercial products (e.g. chocolates, lipsticks, wines), names of creative works (e.g. books, films, plays, poems), names in fiction as well as in the real world – the list goes on and on.
Onomastics
Proper names are a very important part of our lives. We all have personal proper names, and we live in streets and towns with their own proper names. Our pets may have proper names, as may any spiritual beings we believe in. We may change our names at important points in our lives. We may spend ages deciding what proper name, or how many, to give our babies. Names can be hugely culturally and politically important.
Where do names come from?
Most names originated as meaningful words.
There are many obvious names, for example the girl’s name Grace, the
surname Smith, the dog’s name Prince and they are all recognisable
as English words. More often, though, names are from historical languages
no longer widely recognised. These range from ancient Greek and Hebrew,
particularly common in Biblical personal names such as Peter ‘rock’
(Greek) and Matthew ‘gift of God’ (Hebrew), to the Celtic and Germanic
languages spoken in different parts of the Western world over the last
two millennia. In Scotland, for instance, Glasgow ‘green hollow’
is from Cumbric, an early Celtic language, Prestwick ‘priests’ farm’
is from Old English, the language spoken by the Anglo-Saxons who occupied
much of southern Britain from the fifth to the eleventh centuries, and
Kirkoswald ‘Oswald’s church’ is from the Scandinavian language
introduced to Britain by incomers from Denmark and Norway. Some names
are older still, deriving from a language spoken in the British Isles
before the arrival of the Celts a few centuries B.C. These are mostly
river-names, a type of name noted for longevity. Among recent coinages
are street-names, probably the most productive area of name formation
at the present day.
Why are names interesting?
Names are interesting for what they tell us about ourselves and about the people who share or have shared the world with us. The choices we make in giving names to our children, our pets and our homes reflect the things that are important to us.
Also, the names we inherit are interesting too. Our surnames reflect the origins, occupations or characteristics of our ancestors, while the place-names that surround us show how our predecessors described the world, and what languages they spoke. Names are also one of the key tools used by writers of fiction. J. R. R. Tolkien famously created an elaborate system of place-names from the fictional languages of Middle Earth, Thomas Hardy’s Wessex is convincingly located in southern England through a mixture of real, fictional and part-fictional place-names, and clues about the characters in J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series are embedded in their names.
Who studies names?
Names are studied by scholars and amateur researchers
in a wide range of subjects. Archaeologists study them for evidence
of past civilisations. Historians study them for evidence of past events,
settlements and migration patterns. Philologists study them for evidence
of lost languages and early forms of languages. Linguists study them
for evidence of language development. Lexicographers study them for
evidence of words and word meanings. Geographers study them for evidence
of early landscapes. Sociologists study them for evidence of social
change. Genealogists study them for evidence of family history. Local
historians study them for evidence of local history. Anthropologists
study them for evidence of human societies and their organisation. Psychologists
study them for evidence of how memory works. Literary critics study
them for evidence of the interpretation of novels, plays, poems and
songs. It would be difficult to find any subject, particularly in the
arts and social sciences, where name evidence is not relevant.
What onomasticians do?
Onomasticians analyse proper names in various ways. They may study:
Let’s consider onomastics in detail.
The study of onomastics helps identify migration routes and places of former settlement of various people, linguistic and cultural contacts, more ancient situation of languages and dialects of their relationship. Onomastics divided into different branches: Toponymy or toponomastics, the study of place names, is one of the principal branches of onomastics ( England, Irish Sea, Isle of Man, River Themes and so on); Anthroponomastics is the study of personal name (Princess Diana,Barack Obama); ethnonymy is study names of people and tribes (Anglo-saxons,Britons ) and so on.
Toponomy and anthroponomastics are two main branchws of onomastics. Toponymy is the study of place names (toponyms), their origins, meanings, use and typology. The word "toponymy" is derived from the Greek words tópos (τόπος) ("place") andónoma (ὄνομα) ("name"). Toponymy is itself a branch of onomastics, the study of names of all kinds. Place names provide the most useful geographical reference system in the world. Consistency and accuracy are essential in referring to a place to prevent confusion in everyday business and recreation. A toponymist, through well-established local principles and procedures developed in cooperation and consultation with the United Nations Group of Experts on Geographical Names (UNGEGN), applies the science of toponymy to establish officially recognized geographical names. A toponymist relies not only on maps and local histories, but interviews with local residents to determine names with established local usage. The exact application of a toponym, its specific language, its pronunciation, and its origins and meaning are all important facts to be recorded during name surveys.
Toponymists are responsible for the active preservation of their region's culture through its toponymy. They typically ensure the ongoing development of a geographical names data base and associated publications, for recording and disseminating authoritative hard-copy and digital toponymic data. This data may be disseminated in a wide variety of formats, including hard-copy topographic maps as well as digital formats such as Geographical Information Systems and Google Maps.
Example
A favourite example for this writer is the place-name County Oak in England. It was the name of an oak-tree which stood on a county boundary. The oak is dead and gone; the boundary has moved. But the name is still alive as the name of a community that has grown up near where the original tree was. So when the nameCounty Oak is used, the speaker does not directly use the meanings of either of the two words, which are still ordinary words of English, and nor does s/he refer to the thing that the name originally denoted.
This makes names different from expressions in ordinary language. In normal usage, you can't use the phrasethe old oak-tree without relying on the meanings of the, old, oak and tree, and without respecting the rules of grammar which combine them. And such normal phrases can apply to every entity which satisfies the description made by the words, not to just one single entity. (Some phrases may become idioms, like a can of worms, which has nothing to do with cans or worms in everyday chat - it means `a situation or event likely to cause more problems', but not having a regular normal meaning does not make all idioms into proper names. A can of worms still obviously has a general meaning which doesn't apply to only a single entity.)
Anthroponomastics (or
The subdivisions of anthroponymy include:
Examples:
Origins of some of the most popular names today
1.Adobe - came from name of the river Adobe Creek that ran behind the
house of
founder John Warnock.
2.Apple Computers - favourite fruit of founder Steve Jobs. He was three
months late in filing a name for the business, and he threatened to call
his company Apple Computers if the other colleagues didn't suggest a
better name by 5 o'clock.
3.CISCO – it’s not an acronym but short for San Francisco.
4.Google - the name started as a jokey-boast about the amount of information
the
search-engine would be able to search. It was originally named 'Googol',
a word
for the number represented by 1 followed by 100 zeros. After the founders
Sergey
Brin and Larry Page (Stanford grad students) presented their project
to an angel
investor, they received a cheque made out to 'Google'.
5.Hotmail - Founder Jack Smith got the idea of accessing e-mails via
the web from a
computer anywhere in the world. When Sameer Bhatia came up with the
business
plan for the mail service, he tried all kinds of names ending in 'mail'
and finally settled for hotmail as it included the letters "html"
- the programming language used to write web pages. It was initially
referred to as HoTMaiL with selective upper casing.
6.HP - Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard tossed a coin to decide whether
the
company they founded would be called Hewlett-Packard or Packard-Hewlett.
Intel - Bob Noyce and Gordon Moore wanted to name their new company
'Moore
Noyce', but that was already trademarked by a hotel chain, so they had
to settle
for an acronym of INTegrated ELectronics.
7.Microsoft - coined by Bill Gates to represent the company that was
devoted
to MICROcomputer SOFTware. Originally christened Micro-Soft, the '-'
was
removed later on.
8.Motorola - Founder Paul Galvin came up with this name when his company
started manufacturing radios for cars. The popular radio company at
the time
was called Victrola.
9.SAP - "Systems, Applications, Products in Data Processing",
formed by 4
ex-IBM employees who used to work in the 'Systems/Applications/
10.SUN - founded by 4 Stanford University buddies, SUN is the acronym
for
Stanford University Network.
11.Xerox - The inventor, Chestor Carlson, named his product trying to
say 'dry'
(as it was dry copying, markedly different from the then prevailing
wet
copying). The Greek root 'xer' means dry.
12.Yahoo! - the word was invented by Jonathan Swift and used in his
book
'Gulliver's Travels'. It represents a person who is repulsive in appearance
and action and is barely human. Yahoo! founders Jerry Yang and David
Filo
selected the name because they considered themselves yahoos.
Nicknames
Abbreviated Names
Conclusion
The study of onomastics helps identify migration routes and places of former settlement of various people, linguistic and cultural contacts, more ancient situation of languages and dialects of their relationship. Onomastics divided into different branches: Toponymy or toponomastics, the study of place names, is one of the principal branches of onomastics ( England, Irish Sea, Isle of Man, River Themes and so on); Anthroponomastics is the study of personal name (Princess Diana,Barack Obama); ethnonymy is study names of people and tribes (Anglo-saxons,Britons ) and so on.
The list of references: