What Is In A Name

Andre Cramblit andrekar at NCIDC.ORG
Sun Apr 23 21:51:35 UTC 2006


LANGUAGE AND LINGUISTICS 4.4:669-681, 2003

2003-0-004-004-000059-1

What IS a Name? Reflections on Onomastics*

William Bright

University of Colorado





Onomastics, as the study of proper names, has been of concern to many

branches of scholarship, including philosophy and history. The  
present paper takes

the viewpoint of anthropological linguistics, as applied especially  
to personal

names and place names among North American Indians. The question is  
raised as

to whether terms which embody a DESCRIPTION can be considered proper  
names,

e.g., whether a term meaning literally ‘man living by the stream’  
can be a personal

name, or whether a term meaning ‘rock standing by the stream’ can  
be a

placename. Grammatical peculiarities of placenames are also  
considered, and

examples are given from Karuk (California), Creek (Oklahoma), and  
Nahuatl

(Mexico).



Key words: onomastics, toponyms, anthroponyms, North American Indians





“You are sad,” the Knight said in an anxious tone: “let me sing  
you a song to

comfort you.”

“Is it very long?” Alice asked, for she had heard a good deal of  
poetry that day.

“It’s long,” said the Knight, “but very, very beautiful.  
Everybody that hears me

sing it—either it brings the tears into their eyes, or else—”

“Or else what?” said Alice, for the Knight had made a sudden pause.

“Or else it doesn’t, you know. The name of the song is called  
‘Haddocks’ Eyes’.”

“Oh, that’s the name of the song, is it?” Alice said, trying to  
feel interested.

“No, you don’t understand,” the Knight said, looking a little  
vexed. “That’s what

the name is called. The name really is ‘The Aged Aged Man’.”

“Then I ought to have said ‘That’s what the song is  
called’?” Alice corrected

herself.



*

   This paper was delivered as a lecture at the Institute of  
Linguistics, Academia Sinica, on 24

February 2003. I am grateful for helpful comments from my audience,  
especially from Dr. Ho

Dah-an and from my wife, Lise Menn. I would like to dedicate this  
paper to the memory of two

great Chinese linguists who were my teachers and friends: Professor  
Chao Yuen-ren and

Professor Li Fang-kuei.





William Bright



670

“No, you oughtn’t: that’s quite another thing! The song is  
called ‘Ways and

Means’: but that’s only what it’s called, you know!”

“Well, what is the song, then?” said Alice, who was by this time  
completely

bewildered.

“I was coming to that,” the Knight said. “The song really is  
‘A-Sitting on a Gate’:

and the tune’s my own invention.”

—Through the Looking-Glass

1. Terms and definitions

Many books and articles have taken as their title the famous line  
from Shakespeare’s

Romeo and Juliet: “What’s in a name?” I choose to raise a  
slightly different question:

“What IS a name?”—not to answer the question definitively, of  
course, but simply to

focus attention on some aspects of the problem. In doing so, I also  
want to focus

attention on the field of onomastics, understood as the study of  
names. Such study is, in

fact, carried out as part of several larger fields, including  
linguistics, ethnography, folklore,

philology, history, geography, philosophy, and literary scholarship.  
In Europe, especially

in Germany, it is a well recognized branch of philology, as witness  
the three-volume

encyclopedic survey of the field recently published there (Eichler et  
al. 1996, 2,259 pp.)

By contrast, in the US, onomastics is scarcely recognized as a  
scholarly field at all. To

be sure, there is an organization called the American Name Society,  
which publishes a

small journal called Names, but only a few linguists belong to the  
society, and most

linguists have probably never heard of the organization or the  
journal. I myself have

been interested in onomastics since my student days, and I have  
published articles in

the journal Names; but even so, in 1992, when I edited the  
International Encyclopedia

of Linguistics, it never occurred to me to plan for an article on  
names. Fortunately, the

forthcoming second edition of that encyclopedia will repair my omission.

To begin with, the word name is often used to mean a term which can  
refer to

anything, as when we say: “Banana is the name of a fruit,” or  
“Murder is the name of a

crime.” In this sense, the word name is virtually synonymous with  
the word noun;

indeed, in some languages, the same term can used for both, e.g.,  
French nom. In this

sense, the relationship between a name and that to which it refers  
has been the topic of

an extensive literature written by philosophers specializing in  
semantics (cf. Zabeeh

1968, Lehrer 1992, Lamarque 1994). These writers have had much to say  
about the

material in the famous quotation from Through the Looking Glass. I  
must admit to

ignorance of this large topic, and so I will go on to more limited  
aspects of names and

naming.





What IS a Name? Reflections on Onomastics



671

Within the general category of names, people often use the word name  
for what

we can more precisely call proper names. Within this subdivision, it  
is common to

distinguish two principal types. One of these is place names or  
toponyms; another is

PERSONAL NAMES, for which we have no commonly used term derived from  
Greek, but

which are sometimes called anthroponyms. My discussion is limited to  
these two types,

but it can be noted that other varieties exist, such as ethnonyms— 
terms referring to

nationalities or ethnic groups—and glottonyms, referring to  
languages. An English

example of both these types is Chinese, referring not only to the  
nationality, but also to

the language that corresponds to the toponym China.

It is not easy to define the term proper name (Algeo 1973). In  
English and some

other European languages, such words often appear in writing with  
initial capital letters;

but obviously this cannot define the term for spoken language, or for  
writing systems

like Chinese which have no capital letters. Are there grammatical  
criteria to identify the

proper name?

In English, it is often observed that it is unusual for proper names  
to occur with

articles — either indefinite (a, an) or definite (the). A sentence  
like The George and a

Henry come from England is hard to interpret unless someone explains  
that it is

intended to mean ‘The one person in this group named George, and one  
of the people

named Henry, come from England.’

Such usage may be made clearer by the use of spoken or written  
emphasis: He’s

not THE George (who was King of England), he’s just A George (one of  
many people

named George). But of course other languages have very different  
rules for using

definite and indefinite articles; and many languages, such as  
Chinese, do not use

articles at all.

It may be that, for a universal concept of the proper name, we must  
seek semantic

and pragmatic definitions. To put it briefly, we may say that a  
proper name represents a

social convention for brief reference to a specific entity, as  
opposed to a class of

persons or places. For example, George may refer to ‘my cousin who  
is legally

designated as George Baker; the Bakers refers to a family of people  
named Baker (as

contrasted with the bakers ‘the people who bake bread’); America  
may refer to ‘the

nation which is legally and politically designated as the United  
States of America’.

Much more could be—and has been—said about this (cf. Lehrer 1994),  
but I only want

to establish this simple understanding as a basis for further  
discussion.

As I’ve said, the types of proper names which are most often  
discussed are

personal names and placenames. I wish to focus here, first, on a  
proposed characteristic

of personal names, namely their universality; and second, on a  
frequently remarked

characteristic of placenames, namely their descriptiveness. As we  
shall see, there is a

relationship between these two topics.





William Bright



672

Finally, at the end of this paper, I wish to point out that, in some  
languages,

placenames may function not only as nouns, but also as adverbs. I  
believe that this may

the case in many more languages than have been reported.

2. Personal names and universality

There is a piece of folklore current among anthropologists regarding  
the question

of whether personal names exist in all societies. So far I have not  
been able to trace this

to a printed source, but it is somewhat as follows: Somewhere in the  
world there is a

society where people live in very small, isolated communities. In  
such a community,

people have no personal names; i.e., individuals have no name which  
other people use

to refer specifically to them. Instead, they are referred to by  
descriptive expressions, e.g.,

‘the blacksmith’ or ‘the man who lives by the stream’. A woman  
will be referred to as,

e.g., ‘the blacksmith’s wife’. Children will be referred to by  
expressions such as ‘the

blacksmith’s elder daughter’; when this daughter gets married, she  
may be referred to as,

e.g., ‘the wife of the man who lives by the stream’. The question  
arises: Is there such a

society? Or more to the point: Is such a society possible?

In discussing such a question, we need to realize that many people in  
the world do

not have such highly organized systems of personal naming as we are  
accustomed to in

our own societies. In European societies, as well as China and Japan,  
every person is

assigned a public, legal name, in written form, around the time of  
birth; part of this

usually reflects the child’s father’s name. The individual  
normally has that same legal

name through life—with exceptions, e.g., where married women take on  
their husband’s

family names. In addition, a person may have informal “nicknames”  
during different

parts of life. Sometimes these are used only by close relatives or  
intimates; in any case,

they do not replace the public and legal names.

By contrast, in non-literate societies, where names remain unwritten,  
there is

greater variety in naming customs (cf. the anthropological studies in  
Tooker 1984). A

child may be given a “real” name at birth, but this may be kept a  
secret throughout life.

Elsewhere, such a “real” name may be publicly known, but not used  
for everyday

purposes; most of the time, a nickname—perhaps descriptive, e.g.,  
Shorty—may be

used. A person may be called by different names at different periods  
of life, or by

different people under changing conditions. Use of certain names  
under particular

circumstances may be forbidden by religious taboo; or then again,  
such names may be

replaced by descriptive nicknames. Because of these factors, it may  
be difficult for the

outside investigator of such a society to determine what a  
person’s “real” name is, or

even what name is commonly used in the community; taboos are likely  
to be especially

strict when one is talking to outsiders.





What IS a Name? Reflections on Onomastics



673

I suggest then, that the apocryphal community I mentioned—in which  
nobody has

a personal name, and people are referred to only by ad-hoc  
descriptions—does not exist.

I suggest that any anthropologist who might have reported such a  
community was

misled by the operation of taboos on uttering personal names. I  
suggest, in fact, that the

use of personal names, having varying levels of descriptiveness, is a  
sociolinguistic

universal of the human species. Of course, I will be glad if any  
colleague can provide

evidence to prove me wrong. However, the concept of  
“descriptiveness” must itself be

discussed, and I will do this in the following section, in relation  
to placenames.

3. Placenames and descriptiveness

In many parts of the world, it is a commonplace that some placenames  
have no

etymologies that we can discover, e.g., European names like Rome,  
Paris, and London.

It is possible that these were once descriptive expressions in  
European languages, but

they became eroded, phonetically and semantically, so that their  
origins were no longer

apparent. It is also possible that these names were borrowed in  
ancient times from other

languages, of which we have imperfect knowledge, such as Etruscan in  
Italy or Gaulish

in France, and this is why we do not understand their original  
meaning. But other

European placenames have clear descriptive origins, in England, we  
find examples like

Newmarket and Whitechurch.

In North America, many placenames were simply transferred from places in

Europe, such as London and Paris—or, indeed, Newmarket and  
Whitechurch. Other

American placenames do not have clear etymologies in English, but  
this is because they

were borrowed from American Indian languages, in which they were  
descriptive

formations. Examples are Massachusetts, meaning ‘big hill’, and  
Connecticut, meaning

‘long river’, both from an Algonquian language. In addition,  
however, North America

has many placenames which simply describe the American locations to  
which they

were applied, e.g., Long Island (New York State), Great Falls  
(Montana), and Grand

Canyon (Arizona).

In other parts of the world, it is likely that placenames also have a  
variety of

origins; some are transferred, some are borrowed, and many are  
descriptive coinages.

However, the placenames of China and Japan present a special problem.  
On the surface,

it seems possible to find etymologies for most of them in terms of  
the characters with

which they are written; e.g., the Chinese placename Taiwan is written  
with characters

meaning ‘platform’ and ‘bay’; and superficially, that might be  
a correct etymology. In

fact, however, the name is a folk-etymology, based on the name of an  
aboriginal

(Austronesian) tribe. Again, in Japanese, historical study reveals  
that some names were

not formerly written with the same characters that are used today.  
For example, the





William Bright



674

name of Mount Fuji has been written with a variety of characters over  
the centuries, and

its original meaning is controversial; it may be derived from a  
language spoken in the area

before Japanese. It seems possible that, in mainland China also, some  
placenames were

borrowed from non-Chinese languages, such as Manchu (in the north) or  
Thai (in the

south), and it may not be possible to arrive at precise etymologies  
for them.



3.1 American Indian placenames: Must every name have an etymology?



I’ve worked for many years with American Indian languages, and  
I’ve been

especially interested in the placenames used in those languages—many  
of which, as

I’ve noted, have been borrowed into English. (For valuable recent  
studies of the

sociolinguistics of placenames among American Indians and other  
peoples, see Feld &

Basso 1996, Basso 1996; for etymological considerations, cf. Bright  
2002.) However,

especially when one reads discussion of placename origins, one finds  
the persistent bit

of folklore that the meaning of words is, on some essential level, to  
be found in their

histories, rather than in their use. Such belief in the covert  
significance of etymology is

also especially common in discussions of Native American placenames.

One of the most prominent scholars in the field of American  
placenames was

Erwin G. Gudde (1889-1969), a professor of German literature at  
Berkeley who became

an authority on California history; he was the founding editor of  
Names (the journal of

the American Name Society), and the author of California Place Names,  
one of the

most respected among state placename dictionaries. Gudde’s  
dictionary, published by

the University of California Press, went through three editions  
between 1949 and

1969 — and the third edition was, surprisingly, translated into  
Chinese and published in

Taiwan (1989). A fourth edition, revised by myself, came out in 1998.  
However, Gudde

often seemed reluctant to examine possible American Indian  
etymologies for California

placenames, and indeed his views of Native American cultures in  
general were often

rather strange. Thus he stated, in his Preface: “The original  
inhabitants had very few

geographical names, and practically all of these were descriptive...  
Mountains themselves

were of no practical importance to the Indians and probably had no  
names.”

This statement is remarkable, considering that Gudde was familiar  
with such

works as T.T. Waterman’s Yurok Geography (1920), which lists over  
900 placenames

(including mountains) used in the rather limited territory of the  
Yurok tribe and

language, in northwestern California. For years I was puzzled as to  
how Gudde could

have said that American Indians “had very few geographical names.”  
Only more

recently, while reading extensively on American placenames, I’ve  
realized that Gudde’s

statement reflects a long-standing attitude among onomastic scholars.  
In recent years,

Leonard Ashley has written (1996:1403): “What we think of as  
placenames may differ





What IS a Name? Reflections on Onomastics



675

considerably from names Amerindians put upon the land. The red man  
[sic] considered

himself a part of nature, not the master of it... The names he gave  
were more like

descriptions: any large river might be ‘big river’... It is  
arguable that an Amerindian

name that translates ‘where there is a heap of stones’ ... is no  
more a name in our strict

sense than the expression ‘the corner grocery that stays open until  
midnight’.”

The ethnocentric message of these quotations seems to be that  
American Indians,

seen by Whites as “children of nature,” did not have real  
placenames; to the extent that

such names had clear etymologies, they could be regarded as mere  
“descriptions.” Of

course, we might say the same of American English placenames like  
Long Island,

Great Falls, or Grand Canyon. But two other points can be made.  
First, many Native

American placenames were indeed morphologically complex and semantically

“descriptive,” but they are not fairly represented by such  
translations as ‘where there is

a heap of stones’. Thus the Karuk placename asánaamkarak, on the  
Klamath River in

northwestern California, can be interpreted etymologically as ‘where  
a rocky flat place

extends into the water’—but thanks to the “polysynthetic”  
character of the Karuk

language, the native name is a single word and a single lexical item,  
and thus is as

much a proper name as “Rocky Flats”.

At this point I want to return to the notion of what, in terms of  
grammar,

constitutes a “merely descriptive” phrase vs. a “placename”.  
Obviously, in any language,

one can put together a descriptive phrase to describe a place, like  
Ashley’s “corner

grocery that stays open until midnight”. But abundant examples can  
be found, in Karuk

or any other American Indian language, of placenames which, although  
descriptive, are not

cumbersome phrases; rather, they are tight-knit words, sometimes  
quite short; thus the

Karuk placename inaam means ‘place of performing the world-renewal  
ceremony’. In

the Navajo language, spoken in Arizona, the placename Chínlín  
means ‘the stream

flows outward’ (Wilson 1995).

Furthermore, Native Americans used many placenames that were not  
descriptive.

They consisted of single morphemes, with no meaning except their  
toponymic reference.

Among the Karuk tribe, village names included terms such as Píptaas,  
Kíinik, Útkee,

Tíih, Kúuyiv, Túuyvuk, and Vúpam. These are just as unanalyzable,  
whether by the

linguist or the native speaker, as European placenames such as  
London, Paris, or Rome.

To be sure, all these names may have once been “descriptive”—but  
their etymologies,

whether American Indian or European, have long been irrelevant to  
their usage. Their

meanings are, to quote one of my favorite clichés, “lost in the  
mists of antiquity.”

The same principle applies to many names of Native American tribes  
and languages,

such as those of the Cherokee and Choctaw, who now live in Oklahoma.  
(Some of

these have also come to be used by whites as placenames.) It’s clear  
that English

borrowed the first of these terms from the Cherokee self-designation  
Tsalagi, and the





William Bright



676

second from the Choctaw self-designation Chahta. In their respective  
languages, these

words mean nothing more or less than ‘Cherokee’ and ‘Choctaw’.  
However, some

commentators on Indian ethnic names and placenames have strained  
their imaginations

to propose fanciful etymologies. So it has been said that Cherokee  
comes from a word

of the neighboring Creek language, meaning ‘people of a different  
speech’. However,

the Creek word for ‘Cherokee’ is  /calá:kki/, probably borrowed  
from Cherokee Tsalagi;

whereas the unrelated word meaning ‘to speak a different language’  
is /cilo:kk-itá/

(Martin & Mauldin 2000). As for the Choctaw word Chahta, it has been  
said that “its

meaning is unknown”; but as my colleague Pamela Munro points out,  
one might as well

say that the meaning of the Choctaw word Chahta is ‘Choctaw’. Of  
course such names

must have had SOME remote historical origins; but those are lost to  
us, and they are

irrelevant to the speakers of Cherokee or Choctaw. The same label,  
“Meaning unknown,”

could be attached to European ethnic names such as German or Greek.



3.2 The case of Creek



The Creek or Muskogee language, a member of the Muskogean language in  
the

southeastern US, presents interesting toponymic data, in particular  
because of a fact of

recent history: the language was spoken in Georgia and Alabama until  
the early 19th

century, but at that time the US government carried out a forcible  
removal of the

speakers to the western territory which is now called Oklahoma. The  
results as regards

toponymy are reflected in a recent Creek dictionary (Martin & Mauldin  
2000), which is

unusual in that it contains two sections on placenames: one on native  
Creek toponyms,

the other on English placenames of Creek origin. The first of these  
gives not only

geographical names currently used in Oklahoma, but also the  
hereditary groups called

etvlwv /itálwa/, translated as ‘tribal town’ or ‘band’, which  
correspond to towns that

existed earlier in Georgia and Alabama. Among American Indian  
languages, it is true

that descriptive names often predominate, especially where certain  
language families

are involved (e.g., Athabaskan); but the names of Creek tribal towns  
show a different

pattern. Martin & Mauldin list 55 such names. Of these, 5 are  
“modified” derivatives of

simpler names, such as Yofalv-Hopayê ‘Eufaula-distant’,  
comparable to English names

like West Virginia. There are 16 clearly descriptive names, like Tvlv- 
hasse ‘town-rancid’

(Tullahassee in Oklahoma, Tallahassee in Florida), plus 5 which can  
be analyzed only

in part. But 17 names are monomorphemic and etymologically opaque,  
mostly consisting

of only three syllables, e.g., Apehkv (Eng. ‘Arbeka’), Helvpe  
(‘Hillabee’), Kasihta

(‘Cussetah’), Osuce (‘Osochee’), and Taskêke  
(‘Tuskegee’). We may hope that future

dictionaries of American Indian languages will also include sections  
on placenames, to

give us further insights into Native naming patterns.





What IS a Name? Reflections on Onomastics



677

Recall now that the issue of “descriptive expressions” has come up  
in the discussion

of both personal names and placenames. Let me summarize: All human  
beings can

create such expressions, which may be long and syntactically complex.  
But I believe

that all human beings also use proper names, which are typically  
shorter; these sometimes

consist of single morphemes, but also often consist of  
morphologically close-knit,

lexicalized terms. The failure to recognize this, as in the remarks  
by Gudde and Ashley,

may in fact be thinly disguised racism.

4. Placenames as nouns and/or adverbs

The first American Indian language that I studied, starting in 1947,  
was Nahuatl,

spoken by the Aztecs of ancient Mexico, and still used by perhaps a  
million people.

The Nahuatl language happens to have a very large number of  
descriptive placenames,

many of which have been borrowed into Spanish, and some of which have  
become

known internationally, such as the name of the volcano Popocatepetl,  
lit. ‘smoking

mountain’, and indeed the name Mexico itself, from Nahuatl Mexihco,  
meaning ‘the

place of the god Mexihtli’.

A feature of the Nahuatl language which surprised me from the  
beginning was that

placenames seemed to have the characteristics of both nouns and  
adverbs. Morphologically,

placenames normally end in locational elements such as -c (after  
vowels) or -co (after

consonants), meaning ‘at, to’, as well as -pan ‘on’ and - 
tlan ‘near’; these then act like

the case suffixes of Latin, or like the prepositions of Spanish or  
English. Such elements

occur in clearly descriptive combinations such as Atoya-c ‘at the  
river’, Anal-co ‘at the

opposite shore’, Tlal-pan ‘on the land’, and Ati-tlan ‘near  
the water’. Since these

resemble locational case forms of nouns, one would expect them to  
behave like

adverbial expressions, and indeed they do:



(1) Atoyac ihcac, lit. ‘at-the-river he-is-standing’

(2) Tlalpan ihcac ‘on-the-land he-is-standing’

(3) Atitlan ihcac ‘near-the-water he-is-standing’



Note that the ordinary Spanish and English translations of these  
sentences would use

prepositions: ‘Está parado a Atoyac, He is standing at Atoyac, at  
Tlalpan, at Atitlan’;

the locational elements are PART of the Nahuatl placename, but they  
have to be expressed

by prepositions in the European languages.

What surprised me about Nahuatl in 1947 is something that has been more

recently pointed out in print by the Mexican scholar Miguel León- 
Portilla (1982): A





William Bright



678

Nahuatl placename can not only function as an adverb, but also as a  
subject or object

noun, like its Spanish or English counterpart. Thus we can say the  
following:



(4) Atoyac nican ca ‘(The town of) Atoyac is here.’

(5) Tlalpan huey altepetl ‘(The town of) Tlalpan is a big city.’

(6) Atitlan quittac ‘He saw (the town of) Atitlan.’



That is, Nahuatl Tlalpan corresponds both to English ‘at Tlalpan’  
and ‘Tlalpan’. Thus

Nahuatl placenames are syntactically ambivalent in a way not found  
elsewhere in the

language.

Another way of describing this would be to say that a Nahuatl form  
*Tlalpan-pan

does not occur. This could be called a kind of morphological  
dissimilation. It would be

comparable to a Russian example: the city name Tomsk means  
‘pertaining to the river

Tom’; but the adjective Tomskij means both ‘relating to the River  
Tom’ and ‘relating to

the city Tomsk’; there is no *Tomsk-skij, just as there is no  
Nahuatl *Tlalpan-pan (cf.

Menn & MacWhinney 1984).

I received another surprise in the 1950s, when I was doing my  
dissertation

research on the Karuk language in northwestern California. I  
discovered that this

language had the same trait as Nahuatl, but with an extension: in  
Karuk, not just

placenames, but ALL locational expressions are capable of functioning  
both as adverbs

and as nouns. For example, the word for ‘door’ is  
chivchaksurúraam, lit. ‘closing-

place’, as in 7; but it also functions as an adverbial meaning ‘at  
the door’, as in 8:



(7) Hôoy chivchaksurúraam? ‘Where’s the door?’

(8) Chivchaksurúraam u’íihya ‘He’s standing at the door.’



English has one word, home, which functions this way, both as a noun  
and as a locational

adverb, as in This is home and He went home.

In fact, we may point to the example of a Karuk word which can either  
be a

placename or not: The word for ‘bowl’ is ásip. The expression  
‘in the bowl’ has a

locational suffix ásip-ak, but this word is also the name of a native  
village, Asipak, so

called because it’s in a bowl-shaped hollow; and the locational form  
can be used EITHER as

a descriptive adverbial expression OR as a placename. Thus we have  
locational usage in

a sentence like 9, and the locational expression can occur as a noun:



(9)  Xuun ásipak u’íithra ‘The soup is in the bowl’, or ‘The  
soup is in (the

village of) Asipak.’

(10)  Hôoy ásipak? ‘Where is (the village of) Asipak?’





What IS a Name? Reflections on Onomastics



679

The Nahuatl and the Karuk languages are spoken about 2000 miles  
apart, and there is

no known historical relationship between them. I have the impression  
that placenames

in some other American Indian languages can function as both nouns  
and adverbs, but

so far I have not found evidence; I will be grateful if any  
colleagues can point out such

cases to me. I will also be grateful if colleagues can point out  
comparable phenomena

in other parts of the world, e.g., Australia. I believe that  
placenames, and indeed

personal names, have interesting and widespread properties, both  
grammatical and

sociolinguistic, which make them deserving of linguists’ attention.





References



Algeo, John. 1973. On Defining the Proper Name. Gainesville:  
University of Florida

Press.

Ashley, Leonard R. N. 1996. Amerindian toponyms in the United States.  
Namenforschung

/ Name Studies / Les Noms Propres, ed. by Eichler, 1401-1408. Berlin:  
de Gruyter.

Basso, Keith H. 1996. Landscape and Language among the Western  
Apache. Albuquerque:

University of New Mexico Press.

Bright, William. 1957. The Karuk Language. University of California  
Studies in

Linguistics 13. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Bright, William. (ed.) 1992. International Encyclopedia of  
Linguistics. New York: Oxford

University Press.

Bright, William. 2002. The NAPUS (Native American Placenames of the  
United States)

Project: Principles and problems. Making Dictionaries: Preserving  
Indigenous

Languages of the Americas, ed. by William Frawley et al., 322-335.  
Berkeley:

University of California Press.

Eichler, Ernst, et al. (eds.) 1996. Namenforschung / Name Studies /  
Les Noms Propres.

3 vols. Handbücher zur Sprach- und Kommunikationswissenschaft 11.  
Berlin: de

Gruyter.

Feld, Steven, and Keith H. Basso. (eds.) 1996. Senses of Place. Santa  
Fe, NM: School

of American Research Press.

Gēdēng (戈登). 1989. Jiāzhōu Dìmíng Zìdiǎn. Táiběi:  
Liánjīng. [Chinese translation of

the following by Mǎ Quánzhōng.]

Gudde, Erwin G. 1969. California Place Names: The Origin and  
Etymology of Current

Geographical Names (3rd edition). Berkeley: University of California  
Press. [4th

edition, ed. by W. Bright, 1999.]

Lamarque, P. V. 1994. Names and descriptions. Encyclopedia of  
Language and

Linguistics, ed. by R. E. Asher, 2667-2672. Oxford: Pergamon.



Lehrer, Adrienne. 1992. Names and naming: Why we need fields and  
frames. Frames,

Fields, and Contrasts: New Essays in Semantic and Lexical  
Organization, ed. by

A. Lehrer and E. F. Kittay, 123-142. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.

Lehrer, Adrienne. 1994. Proper names: Linguistic aspects.  
Encyclopedia of Language

and Linguistics, vol.6, ed. by R. E. Asher, 3372-3374. Oxford: Pergamon.

León-Portilla, Miguel. 1982. Los nombres de lugar en náhuatl: Su  
morfología, sintaxis

y representación glífica. Estudios de Cultura Náhuatl 15:37-72.

Martin, Jack B., and Margaret McKane Mauldin. 2000. A Dictionary of  
Creek/Muskogee,

with Notes on the Florida and Oklahoma Seminole Dialects of Creek.  
Lincoln, NE:

University of Nebraska Press.

Menn, Lise, and Brian MacWhinney. 1984. The repeated morph  
constraint: Towards an

explanation. Language 60:419-541.

Tooker, Elisabeth. (ed.) 1984. Naming Systems: Proceedings of the  
American Ethnological

Society 1980. Washington, DC: American Ethnological Society.

Waterman, T. T. 1920. Yurok Geography. University of California  
Publications in

American Archaeology and Ethnology 16.5:177-314. Berkeley: University of

California Press.

Wilson, Alan. 1995. Navajo Place Names. Guilford, CT: Jeffrey Norton.

Zabeeh, Farhang. 1968. What Is in a Name? An Inquiry into the  
Semantics and

Pragmatics of Proper Names. The Hague: Nijhoff.





[Received 26 February 2003; revised 14 April 2003; accepted 21 April  
2003]



1625 Mariposa Avenue

Boulder, CO 80302

USA

William.Bright at colorado.edu



What IS a Name? Reflections on Onomastics



681

名為何物?──我對專名學的看法

William Bright (威廉•布萊特)

科羅拉多大學





專名學是包含哲學、歷史學等許多學門關心的、研究 
專有名詞的學問。

本文採用的是應用於北美印第安人名、地名研究的人 
類語言學的觀點。本文

提出了一個問題:「專有名詞可不可以是描述性的詞 
語?」。例如,字面意

義為“住在溪邊的人”的詞可不可以是個人名, 
而“溪邊的石頭”可不可以

是個地名?此外,本文同時以加州的Karuk語、奧克拉荷 
馬州的Creek語與

墨西哥的Nahuatl語的例子討論地名的語法特點。



關鍵詞:專名學,地名,人名,北美印第安人





「你很悲傷,」騎士擔心地說:「讓我唱首歌來安慰 
你。」

「這首歌很長嗎?」愛麗絲問道,因為她這一天已經聽 
夠了詩了。

「是很長,」騎士回答:「不過非常、非常美。每個聽 
我唱的人不是熱淚盈

眶,就是...」

「就是怎樣?」愛麗絲問,因為騎士突然停了下來。

「就是沒有熱淚盈眶,你知道的。這首歌名叫“黑線 
鱈的眼睛”。」

「喔。那是這首歌的名字,是吧?」愛麗絲說,想盡力表 
現出感興趣的樣

子。

「不,你不懂,」騎士看起來有點惱:「那是它被稱呼的 
名字。它真正的名

字是“一個很老很老的人”。」

「那麼我應該說:『那是這首歌被稱呼的名字』?」愛 
麗絲更正自己。

「不,你不該,那根本是另一回事!這首歌叫做“方法與 
手段”,但那只是

人們對它的稱呼而已,你知道的!」

「嗯,那這首歌到底是什麼?」這時愛麗絲已經完全被 
弄糊塗了。

「我正要說,」騎士說:「這首歌其實是“坐在大門 
上”,旋律是我自己創

作的。」

──《鏡中奇緣》
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://listserv.linguistlist.org/pipermail/endangered-languages-l/attachments/20060423/41b989c8/attachment.htm>


More information about the Endangered-languages-l mailing list