Toponomastics

Toponomastics: the study of place names.

Name typology

In toponomastics, it is important to highlight, on the one hand, the individual that uses language, and on the other hand, the language community’s perspective. Naming and the interpretation of names are always the action of both the individual and the community. The name giver is an individual and the first who uses a certain expression but approving the expression as a name requires the community, a group that starts to use this expression in the function of a name. So-called planned names make up an exception to this practice as these names are those formed for official use. They are approved in official decision-making processes and adopting them does not therefore require the approval of the entire language community.
Of course, a name giver is himself always a member of the language community. He lays the naming foundation for names already in existence used by the language community, name models. These models can be structural (for example, Finnish town or city names ending in “la” or “lä”, such as Kokkola and (Rääkkylä) or lexical (for example, Finnish hydronyms starting with
Väärä such as “Vääräjoki” ‘crooked|river’ and “Vääräkoski” ‘crooked|rapids’).

Naming is analogous, which means that some other nomenclature, in one way or another, acts as a model for new names. Using names and their interpretation at their moment of use are also all the time linked to name giving. All the names we know make up our mental storage of names or onomasticon. The notion once presented by Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, that names had originally been appellatival expressions, only concern either the early stages of language development, whereupon the difference between appellatives and proper names were still not clear, or the emergence stage of a new name category. When a new name emerges in an existing name category, it emerges in a set naming system model. While creating a new name, an expression according to dominating name formation rules is formed, which is recognised as a proper name on the basis of specific distinguishing features and which can not easily be confused with appellatives. In place of rules or the grammar of names, we can speak of name typology which refers to a name’s classification into different types on the basis of structural circumstances. Language speakers recognise these different name types of the language and analogously form new names, complying with typological name models.

The typological information of names includes information on what
the names phonologically, morphologically, syntactically and semantically
are. Phonological information includes information on the sound structure
of names, such as the fact that most names ending with a female first
names. Morphological information helps us recognise the features of the
name’s form, for example surnames ending in son or place names ending in
-ville“. The syntactic information tells us how a name’s elements are connected
to one another and in what kind of syntactic relation they are in comparison
to each other. For example, there are such compound names as Chapel Hill
or Jamestown whose initial parts can be recognised as either being in the
nominative or genitive case which syntactically modifies the nominative
formed word that is the final part of the name. Semantic information is
the information on the content of meaning which, on the one hand, can
be information on what kind of meanings are included in the words being
name elements, on the other hand why a certain kind of name is given to a
certain referent.




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