7 - ONOMASTICS

Summary

Sources and methodology

General principles

Names, whether of places or of people, have by definition a distinctive standing vis-à-vis the language at large. Although ultimately derived from elements of common vocabulary (not necessarily that of the language they currently grace), they have become emptied of their original etymological denotation; and this is true even for those whose form still coincides with that of the related lexical items: no-one expects to find cattle wading across the river at Oxford and, should a Mr Butcher actually be in the meat trade, the coincidence almost excites mirth.

On the one hand, this semantic detachment promotes cross-cultural survival: some Present-Day ‘English’ place names are traceable to Celtic forms at least two millennia old, a few even suspected of going back to pre-Celtic times; some ‘English’ baptismal names have Hebrew origins. On the other, it lays names open to phonological attrition, for no more of any form need survive than is required for acting, in context, as an unambiguous signal or pointer. Name compounds are thus subject to early obscuration, to having their unstressed syllables reduced more drastically than similar ones of analogous ‘meaningful’ forms, and to being ‘folk-etymologised’ (Lass 1973; Coates 1987; Colman 1989a and b; Clark 1991). As well as complicating the etymologising process, this makes name material an unreliable guide to the incidence and the chronology (though not the nature) of general sound changes; it raises, indeed, a possibility of there having been specifically onomastic changes, related to the general ones but carrying them further (see further below, pp. 593–4).