Onomastica

The article expands and modifi es the contexts in which literary onomastics currently operates. This strictly interdisciplinary field of research, primarily originating from linguistics, has sought out the contexts that triggered non-obvious meanings of names readable in the artistic work from the outset. The references were varied – stylistics, textology, philosophy, structural poetics. All of them significantly enriched onomastic analyses, leaving some fundamental sense of insufficiency at the same time. That is the reason why we propose the project of the connection between literary onomastics and — now extremely extensive — theoretical thought. The article is not the end of this discussion, but rather an exploratory study and the beginning of scientific research. Consequently, there is no one ordering and chronological concept with a clear conclusion, but the main aim is to show the analysis of the claims relevant for further research. Therefore, several concepts of theoreticians interested in proper names in literature were discussed (far from a common phenomenon in this case). From the research projects analyzed, including among others: U. Eco, J.F. Lyotard, P. de Man, there emerges a clear conviction of the need to end the search for a referential, texted name. In this place it refers, on the one hand, to itself, establishing its own unreal meaning (image-forming, phonic, intertextual); on the other, it concerns the author’s system of naming (and beyond), which is also an epistemological concept. The starting point of these diagnoses was the thoroughly interpreted self-analysis of artistic works made by Marcel Proust; for further analysis, the thesis of Walter Benn Michaels was also employed, which brings interest in proper names from literature to the domain of artistic experiences. The conducted analysis (designing future literary onomastic research) leads to the fi nal conclusion that the proper name indicates the essence itself, the arche of our existence.

The article concerns the history and unique nature of local names derived from exonyms, such as Alexandria, Spain and Lisbon. It describes both past and contemporary onyms, i.e. the names of housing estates, such as Little Tuscany, and apartment buildings, such as Rome, London and Mont Blanc, which are the continuations of the toponymic model launched in the past. The author embeds this model of names in a broader cultural context by referring to language universals. In addition to the rich collection of the oldest biblical names that have been transferred to present names, transfers of old names can be observed among contemporary names. In the past (in the early nineteenth and twentieth centuries), these were mainly the names of countries and, less frequently, those of cities, lands and geographic objects. Today, toponyms are usually based on the names of European cities, attractive geographic objects (lakes, rivers, islands, mountains, volcanoes) and, more rarely, states. While the names of biblical lands were fascinating and attractive in the past, they are almost absent in contemporary names, and if they are present, they concern culturally fixed images such as that of Eden. Both formerly and today, the creators of this kind of names show a longing for the creation of a new world which is no longer inhabited by God in a strictly religious dimension, but a secular one where happiness, peace and joy are sought. In both characterised spaces, the names transferred serve commemorative functions and also imitate coveted spaces which cannot be physically inhabited but can at least be imitated by their names. Formerly, they were real imago mundi representing sacred places (e.g. names such as Calvary). Today, they are created as part of the contemporary architectural tendency for coherence in planning space, names and design.

In the introduction, examples from the Croatian language are used to exemplify the anthroponymization of appellatives (e.g. appellative kovač → family name Kovač), appelativization of anthroponyms (e.g. family name Penkala → appellative penkala) and transonymization (e.g. hydronym Una → first name Una). All of the listed transitions represent evidence that there are no firm boundaries between the onymic and appellative lexicon, nor within the onymic lexicon.

The central part of the study is dedicated to the so-called pure transanthroponymization of the type first name Vinko → family name Vinko. Pure transanthroponymization results in different combinations of homonymic pairs of anthroponyms in the anthroponymic formula / anthroponymic formulae (e.g. David David; David Vinko, Vinko David; David Novak — Josip David). Given that context does not contribute to the correct understanding of the message transmitted by the anthroponymic formula in the case of first name-family name homonymy, possible consequences of this homonymy for onomastic communication are emphasised. Also listed are examples of anthroponymic formulae of the Saša Pavlić type (it is impossible to distinguish whether the person is male or female from the first name) and Ivan Vinko Boris (it is impossible to distinguish whether the person has two first names or two family names from the anthroponymic formula) which also “stifle” the onomastic information.

The author concludes that the boundaries between first names and family names are not fixed and cautions of the need to carefully select the first name of a child bearing a family name created by the pure transanthroponymization of a first name.

A longstanding folk tradition among rural Russian peasants, ulichnye familii (‘street surnames’) were used by Doukhobors colloquially ‘on the street’ of a village to distinguish among families sharing the same official surname. Similar to Quebecois dit names and Scottish sept names, ulichnye familii arose because of the low surname stock within Doukhobor society. Passed down to succeeding generations and transferred between settlements, these names became a recognized form of address among Doukhobors, helping structure kinship networks and organize social interactions among villagers. When a large contingent of Doukhobors emigrated from the Caucasus to the Canadian prairies in 1899, they continued this naming practice in their settlements well into the early 20th century. A ubiquitous part of their culture for generations, today ulichnye familii have all but disappeared among Doukhobors, as a result of their assimilation, dispersal and modernization. This article offers an analysis of the Doukhobor anthroponymic custom of ulichnye familii: the social factors leading to their adoption; the etymological processes through which these names were formed; the manner in which they were used and transmitted; and the elements contributing to their eventual decline and disuse. It also includes an inventory of extant ulichnye familii among the Doukhobors of the Caucasus and Canada, obtained through extensive fi eld interviews and archival research.

The article contains preliminary considerations on the principles of the standardization of geographical names in Poland, in particular the names of physiographic objects. The notion of a country’s language policy has been referred to as one of its tools is the standardization of geographical names. The general objectives of the Polish language policy were listed as such: the assertion of legal status of the Polish language as the first language in Poland; the assertion of conditions for the development of national and ethnic minority languages in the country; the construction of a Polish- language national and state community. Legal acts concerning Polish language and geographical nomenclature were indicated. It was stated that the assumed effect of political and linguistic actions should be to develop a nomenclature in correct Polish, one which is pragmatically effective, rooted in tradition and, as a result of this study, one should expect to achieve an optimal course of the language communication process in each communicative community. Then, the criteria of the linguistic correctness of geographical names applied to date were discussed and similarities indicated in the standardization procedure with regards to geonyms and specialist terms. The rules of the detailed standardization procedure will be presented in the second part of the article

In the paper, on the basis of several dozen examples of hydronyms from eastern and north-eastern Mazovia, the erroneous attribution of written sources and, as a consequence, their incorrect identification and location were shown. These kinds of mistakes can be found in toponymical, hydrographical and historical publications. It is the result of taking attestations from the context of the source, poor knowledge of the history and the geography of the studied area, as well as the poor knowledge of Latin and the lack of verification of hypotheses found in older literature.

Water names, using the genetic-motivational criteria, can be divided into two superior groups: deappellative and deproprial hydronyms. Among the hydronyms derived from proper names, one can distinguish between the detoponymic and deanthroponymic. The names of flowing waters from anthroponyms are the subject of this article. Preliminary statistical data regarding deanthroponymic potamonyms in the Vistula river basin, their chronology, naming models, word formation bases and geographical distribution are presented. The results of the analysis show that the deanthroponymic potamonyms account for approximately 6.8% of the names of flowing waters of the Vistula river basin, estimated at more than 13,500. They appear sporadically in documents as early as in the 13th century, with only 12% visible until the 16th century, with most of them not being noticed until the 19th and 20th centuries. Such a statistical distribution is typical for the names of the flowing waters of that basin. Deanthroponymic names of rivers represent a variety of naming models, but most often appear as a part of compound names created with the suffix -ów, one-word formations with the same suffix and derivatives from the suf. -ka. They mainly identify objects located between the Soła River and the Dunajec River, especially in the Dunajec River basin, so in mountainous and submontainous areas, as K. Rymut claimed. The basis of such potamonyms are mainly personal names with different motivations, rarely being ethnonyms and first names.

The aim of the paper is to discuss the linguistic and onymic properties of the geographical names of the Hutsul region (Гуцульщина, Ukraine) used by Stanisław Vincenz in the first volume (“Prawda starowieku”) of his tetralogy “Na wysokiej połoninie” (“On the High Uplands”). The volume was first published in 1936. The second edition appeared in 1980 in Poland and was the one which had the greatest impact on the reception of the Vincenz’s work in the Polish readership after WW2. This is why the 1980 edition has been used as the source of analysed toponymic material. The main finding is that the analysed toponymy is of heterogeneous and (to a certain extent) hybrid nature, combining Polish, Ukrainian, and dialectal Hucul linguistic properties, which perfectly coincides with general tendency in the use of geographical names of the Hucul region in texts produced in the Polish language from the mid-19th century. The names used by Vincenz in the book written in the period 1930–1936 seem to faithfully reflect some specific characteristics of Hutsul toponymy in the 1930s (as discussed by the linguist Stefan Hrabec in his dissertation). Finally, some instances of toponyms’ declension present in “Prawda starowieku” are discussed together with some examples of (partially folk) etymologies codified by Vincenz in his work.

The theme of the description and analysis are the titles of stories in the collection „Na Skalnym Podhalu” by Kazimierz Tetmajer, as well as the title of the whole book itself. The aim of this description is to indicate the formal (syntactic) and semantic differentiation of titles, to present their stylistic and textual conditions and determine the function which they have in the structure of individual stories and in the whole collection. As far as the form is concerned, one can distinguish between double (3) and simple (36) titles. A considerable number of simple titles are in the form of a sentence (10), one title represents announcements (nominal sentences), the remaining ones (25) are the titles in the form of notifi cation. The most common and the most characteristic titles for that collection are the titles-sentences with a structure of Jak umarł Jakub Zych and determining announcements with a structure of O Wojtku cudaku. In terms of semantics, the titles of stories represent the basic type which is informative and descriptive one because they provide information on the content of stories: most often about main characters or plot themes, less frequently about the place of the action, theme or type of the text. One of the titles has an interpretative value. The titles occurring in “Na Skalnym Podhalu” strongly correlate with the style of texts in the collection, where the dominant principle is folklore. This principle is visible in the stylisation of the Podhale dialect and in the stylisation of a tale as the form of oral folk tale. Thus, the presence of dialect forms and dialect lexis as well as many proper names which were authentic lexically and often also denotatively, being connected with geographical and cultural space of the Podhale region and Tatra mountains. Furthermore, the pattern “O + miejscownik” (About + locative) referring to metatextual and pragmatic frame of oral folk tales also occurs very often. The titles of stories in the collection “Na Skalnym Podhalu” not only perform the typical delimitative, distinctive and identifying functions but also descriptive and — as in the case of the title of the whole book — integrative ones.

The paper is dedicated to the names of associations from the period of the Second Polish Republic, taken from a publication which is a guide to the rich and differentiated world of the social organizations of the 1930s.

The introduction is devoted to the state of Polish linguistic research into the names of organizations. The description of the collected material is based on the concept of social chrematonymy by Artur Gałkowski.

Next, the names are investigated from both a structural and a semantic perspective. The following elements are regarded as distinct qualities of the naming structures: descriptive character, multicomponent structure, development of right-sided attributives, insignificant share of names with a separate distinctive element, including some other types of proper names as components (toponyms, anthroponyms, names of historical events). Also, lexemes in the function of the main component of the analysed structures — nouns having the semantic value of ‘formalized group of people’ – have been presented.

When analysing the semantic aspect of names of organizations more closely, the author indicates the most frequently exposed bases of community feeling of members. Those could be: common experience, social and professional status, the purpose of activity, gender, generation, religious identity, nationality, ideology, place of activity or founding an organization. In the majority of names, various elements of community feeling are combined.

Finally, attention is paid to the tremendous informative value present in the names of associations, connected with their descriptive quality. The close link between socioideonyms and the reality they are connected with means that they are bearers of various historical-cultural contents.

Therefore, the names of associations, especially historical ones, might be an interesting object of culture-oriented linguistic studies.

The paper considers a particular case of onomastic motivation, providing examples of the use of the adjective tani ‘cheap’ in the creation of pharmacy names in Poland (e.g. Tanie Leki ‘cheap medicines’, Tania Apteka ‘cheap pharmacy’). This Polish word is frequently used in marketing, both as an element of company names and marketing slogans. In many instances tani constitutes part of a complex pharmacy name, e.g.: Całotygodniowa Apteka Familijna — Tylko Tanie Leki, Super Tania Apteka im. Zawiszy Czarnego, Centrum Tanich Leków — Apteka św. Barbary. On the basis of judgments from Polish administrative courts, the article discusses the question of the distinction or lack of one between advertisements and proper names. The significant fact is that the Pharmaceutical Law has prohibited the advertising of the operations of pharmacies since 2012 and, as a result, the use of names with the component tani was found to be in violation of the provision. In response to this, the owners of stores have argued that the proper name refers to the object alone, having no literal meaning. The controversial phrases were used to create legal names which are placed on signboards and in announcements. The paper focuses on a more general problem: chrematonyms and appellative lexis can hardly be distinguished due to their persuasive and marketing value.

The purpose of this paper is to discuss the distinguished properties of by-names as forms different from official ones, to analyze their structural and semantic features and to search for their historical evidence. By-names of Chinese places should not be defined as unusual and informal, since actually in many cases by-names are formal and very common in China nowadays. By-names are generally bestowed on important places (mostly cities) that win the public interest. Most of them have two structural parts, the front specific parts are determiners / qualifiers and the back ones are generics. The generics generally are: cheng 城 ‘town / city’, du 都 ‘capital’, jiang 江 ‘river’, shan 山 ‘mountain’, dao 岛 ‘island’ etc. The lexical meanings of lexical items forming specific parts of by-names mainly refer to animals, plants, minerals, local manufactured products, climate and natural scenery, geographical location, humans, areas, etc. Chinese contemporary by-names, used on various occasions, vary in frequency and stability. The by-names discussed in the paper only account for a small proportion and are listed just due to their relatively high frequency, stability and acceptability.

The article focuses on the translation of non-literary Chinese proper names, a subject which to date has not enjoyed much research interest as a result of the common belief that proper names are untranslatable. The article discusses techniques used in the translation of Chinese anthroponyms, toponyms and brand names into Polish and English. The author refers to the strategies used in the process of transferring names to the target language and presents the consequences of applying given techniques from the cognitive perspective, which entails analysing the names in terms of their structure and meaning. Particular attention is paid to the connotations of the names, the impact they have on the speakers of a given language, as well as the mental images that can be derived from their structure. In the contrastive analysis of the names of tourist locations in Beijing and their Polish and English equivalents, the author applies the cognitive grammar approach as developed by Ronald W. Langacker. The image schemas of the names are used to present the distinct conceptualizations embodied in the names with the same references in diff erent languages. One of the chapters describes how European names are adapted into Chinese. The study also provides an overview of the characteristics of the Chinese onomasticon, a factor which makes translation from Chinese to European languages particularly complicated. The observations made in the course of the analysis permit conclusions to be drawn on the linguistic worldview created by Polish, Chinese and English propria.

The article is devoted to more comprehensive use of medieval onymic resources in research on the history of the Polish language. These materials were used in research on the phonetic development of the Polish language in its earliest period. To date, they have rarely appeared in lexical studies. The body of the oldest appellatives, reconstructed on the basis of proper names, would be a kind of lexicon (supplement) enriching and verifying old Polish lexical material, certifi ed in historical Polish dictionaries (also in etymological dictionaries). In this way, the expectations formulated over 100 years ago by eminent Polish linguists may be fulfi lled. The complementary use of such a huge wealth of material opens up further research perspectives towards etymological, dialectological, lexical and morphological research.

Polish microtoponyms, as they were used in the middle 20th century, are known today mainly thanks to a field names-gathering action probably initiated in 1954 and finished as late as in 1970, carried out by Polish linguists from Krakow, Warsaw, Łódź, Wrocław, Toruń, Lublin and Poznań. The present paper tries to reconstruct its process and the fate of the collected materials, which served as the basis for the incomplete series “Official names of localities and physiographical objects” published in 142 county fascicles between 1963 and 1975. While part of them have been saved and are being published on a digital platform, a lot of information has been irretrievably lost due to the carelessness of its depositaries.

The article is an attempt to reflect upon the way in which some terms coming from modern anthropology (local knowledge, thick description) can be used in studies regarding proper names in the cultural and social perspective. This anthropological way of thinking has been presented in Artur Rejter’s new book “Proper Names in (Con)texts of Culture”. The author of the article shows that studying culture through proper names must entail the widening of the variety of scientific methods and strategies and adding those used in social studies and humanities.