26.32, Review: Morphology; Philosophy of Lang; Semantics; Syntax: Colman (2014)

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LINGUIST List: Vol-26-32. Sat Jan 03 2015. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 26.32, Review: Morphology; Philosophy of Lang; Semantics; Syntax: Colman (2014)

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Date: Sat, 03 Jan 2015 21:32:03
From: Geoffrey Sampson [sampson at cantab.net]
Subject: The Grammar of Names in Anglo-Saxon England

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Book announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/25/25-3071.html

AUTHOR: Fran  Colman
TITLE: The Grammar of Names in Anglo-Saxon England
SUBTITLE: The Linguistics and Culture of the Old English Onomasticon
PUBLISHER: Oxford University Press
YEAR: 2014

REVIEWER: Geoffrey Sampson, University of South Africa

Review's Editor: Helen Aristar-Dry

SUMMARY

New parents seeking attractive names to give their children are sometimes
disappointed to find that the etymologies of traditional English names don’t
seem to make much sense.  Alfred, for instance, meant ''elf-advice'', while
Rosalind meant ''horse-snake''.  (Although Alfred is an Anglo-Saxon name, few
such names survived the Conquest; but plenty of now-traditional English names
which were introduced by the Normans derive from a sister Germanic language
and reflect similar conventions:  thus Richard meant ''kingship-hard''.)  The
Anglo-Saxons, like a number of other Indo-European peoples, did not choose
personal names to be meaningful.  What they mostly did was to form compounds
from pairs of roots which might have no natural semantic relationship with one
another.  These roots were usually drawn from a stock of roots standardly used
as name-components, many of which were rare or obsolete as common (i.e.
non-name) words.  The semantic arbitrariness of the resulting compounds
probably helped them to be recognizable as names, and the fact that the roots
could be combined fairly freely allowed for a good supply of distinctive names
even though the same individual roots, ''elf'', ''kingship'', and so forth,
cropped up in many different names.  (For us the distinctiveness of our names
resides principally in our surnames, but for the Anglo-Saxons inherited
surnames lay far in the future.)

Linguists agree that one component of the tacit knowledge which a speaker
draws on in using his or her language must be a ''lexicon'':  a register of
the relevant linguistic properties of individual common words.  Fran Colman
argues that a speaker must also have a mental ''onomasticon'', which records
the facts the speaker needs to know in order to follow the conventions for
using names, and particularly for bestowing names on newborns in a socially
appropriate way.  Her aim in this book is to explore the nature of the
pre-Christian English onomasticon.

(Christianity introduced great changes to naming conventions.  The Church
encouraged people to use Biblical and saints’ names, whose etymologies would
have been opaque to most Europeans and which in any case were formed on
different systems.  And even when pre-Christian names continued in use, the
idea of combining roots freely was lost.  Boys are still christened Alfred or
Richard, but not *Alfhard or *Richred, though for pagan Anglo-Saxons
''elf-hard'' and ''kingship-advice'' might have been equally good names.)

Part I of Colman’s book analyses the general concept of names.  One chapter
discusses what it is logically to be a name, another argues that a name should
not be classed grammatically as a noun, and another discusses the grammatical
functions which names do possess.  Then Part II treats names in Old English. 
A chapter introduces the data on name-formation.  Many names were two-root
compounds as discussed above, but some were single roots, either bare or with
derivational affixes, and the roots might be phonetically modified, often
representing baby-talk pronunciations.  As with us, a particular name was
usually exclusive either to males or to females, and this might correlate with
grammatical gender of a root, or with the meaning of a root, but the
correlations were not straightforward.  (Gertrude meant ''spear-strength'',
two roots which do not represent notably feminine concepts, though the
''strength'' root is feminine in gender; the roots of Rosalind are, I believe,
grammatically neuter and masculine respectively.  Although neither of these
names was Anglo-Saxon, similar cases occurred in that language.)  Further
chapters discuss more technical aspects of Old English morphology applicable
to name words, and related matters.

Colman includes abundant references to earlier literature on the subject, and
takes issue with some of what has been said.  Compounds where neither root
occurs separately have apparently been seen as oddities, but she points out
(p. 195) that an Old English name such as Beagstan, where neither 'beag' nor
'stan' are used as common words but both occur in other names, is perfectly
normal.  In other cases she sees a predecessor as failing to observe rules
limiting the possible root-combinations, for instance (ibid.) J.R. Dolan
posited a hypothetical name *Sunuæthel (I use ''th'' for the Old English thorn
letter), which for Colman is ''ungrammatical''.

The concluding chapter leads up to the presentation of a sample extract from
an Old English onomasticon structured as Colman believes appropriate. 
Individual entries are for single roots (rather than for names as wholes), and
the various categories of information contained in an entry show whether it
can be used as first or as second root in a compound name, or as a single-root
name (some roots can occur in all three ways), which sex it applies to in the
various positions (some roots are sex-neutral as first root in a compound name
but sex-specific as second root, others are sex-specific in either position),
which declension-class it belongs to (as a second or sole root), and how, if
at all, it can form a diminutive.  (The full name Dudman yields either of the
familiar diminutives Duding or Dudecil, for instance, but Leofhelm can become
only Leofing.)  Speakers of Old English, according to Colman, did not (as we
do) hold in their heads a list of complete names; they held information about
name-roots, and used this to coin well-formed names when the need arose.

EVALUATION

This is a rather muddled book, which is already manifest in the first,
introductory chapter.  A book-chapter headed ''1:  Introduction'' normally
sets the scene for what follows by outlining at least some of the main issues
that the body of the book will proceed to take up.  But more than half of
Colman’s Introduction is about a specific question which is not relevant to
the rest of the book:  namely, whether any Anglo-Saxon moneyers (the people
who were commissioned to manufacture coins, and commonly included their names
on their coins) were female.  The question arises because two of the many
name-forms found on coinage look feminine; but names were often abbreviated,
and Colman’s conclusion after many pages of discussion is that these were
probably abbreviations of masculine names and that all moneyers were male. 
That would be unsurprising, in view of general social conditions and the fact
that coin-making with simple technology needed strength and stamina.  But in
any case the sex of moneyers tells us nothing about the declared topic of
Colman’s book.  Evidently she came to that topic, Anglo-Saxon naming
behaviour, through a prior interest in numismatics, and her examples of
Anglo-Saxon names are largely drawn from those found on coins.  This is well
and good, but there is no reason to expect readers of a book about naming
conventions to share all the other interests the author happens to have.

Even within the proper topic of the book there is an unresolved tension.  On
the one hand, it is about the theoretical linguistic concept of a mental
''onomasticon'', on the other it is about naming conventions in a long-dead
society for which the evidence is limited.  One might think that a better
foundation for an onomasticon theory would be data from a range of present-day
societies, where fuller evidence is available and where that evidence would
make it easier to distinguish universals of onomasticon structure from
conventions specific to a particular society.  But if the main concern is the
facts of Anglo-Saxon naming, then the extremely abstract nature of Colman’s
theorizing tends to blur these rather than bringing them into focus.  Often I
wondered whether some feature of her theory corresponded to a real Anglo-Saxon
convention or merely to limitations in the available data.  Do we really know,
for instance, that the diminutive suffixes did not combine freely with the
name-roots?  If we have Duding and Dudecil, and Leofing but no Leofecil, could
it be that the form Leofecil was also possible but just happened not to occur
in writings which survived?  I do not know the answer to that, but the nature
of Colman’s treatment does not encourage the reader to explore such questions.

Some of Colman's factual statements about names in our own society do not
chime with my experience.  She says (p. 47) that giving (any) name to a car
would be ''breaking a linguistic convention'', but it seems to me that plenty
of competent English-speakers have names for their cars; and (p. 48) that a
name like John is reserved for male humans, so that, again, calling one's dog
John would be ''breaking with convention'' -- but while some dogs have
specialized dog-names like Rover, I should have thought it was absolutely
normal to give a pet dog a human name.  When it comes to coining names by
combining roots productively, as the Anglo-Saxons did, Colman shows how
difficult it is to determine what the conventions are by revealing lack of
awareness of modern English word-coinage conventions.  On pp. 68-9 she queries
why some linguists recognize ''hydronymy'' (misprinted at one point as
''hydronomy''), i.e. names of rivers, lakes, etc., as a special category of
names but do not recognize parallel categories of mountain-names or
island-names; and she suggests that the latter should be called ''vounonymy''
and ''nisionymy'' respectively.  Now in the first place, so far as I know
historical linguists talk about hydronyms as a category not for any
theoretical reason but just because, in practice, names of rivers often (but
names of mountains or islands less often) reflect languages that are no longer
spoken in their vicinity.  But also, when learned words are formed from Greek
roots, conventionally they always use classical rather than modern Greek
roots, spelled according to Latin orthography.  The appropriate English terms
would be ''bunonymy'' and ''nesonymy'' (though, since the word which gives
modern Greek 'vouno', ''mountain'', meant something smaller in the classical
period, in practice a coinage for ''mountain-naming'' would use the classical
term for ''mountain'', giving ''oronymy'').  These conventions are easier to
ascertain than those for Anglo-Saxon name formation.

Colman repeatedly undermines her own authority by including anecdotal material
apparently just for the pleasure of personal reminiscence.  For instance, she
recalls (p. 77) a ''wine-sodden'' lunch with friends in Greece where
conversation turned on the word ''sybil'' and the catchphrase used by Prunella
Scales playing Sybil Fawlty in the television series Fawlty Towers.  It must
have been fun to sit at that table, but the story does little to further the
academic argument of the surrounding paragraphs, so the reader is left
wondering whether the author is taking her task seriously enough to justify
correspondingly serious effort on the reader’s part.  (This book is far from
an easy read.)  When, in a discussion of modern names as social indicators (p.
41), Colman writes ''personal experience has ... encouraged the expectation
that a twentieth-century man called 'Angus' with a Scottish surname is likely
... to have been born in southern England'', I am really not sure whether she
is suggesting that the majority of people called Angus McSomething nowadays
are southern Englishmen (interesting if true, and surprising to me), or merely
that she happens to have a couple of friends who fit that description and she
wants to give them a name-check in her book.

Conversely, Colman has an odd habit of using quotations from her own earlier
publications as if they had an authority which would not be accorded to the
same assertions if they were made here directly, outside inverted commas.  At
one point she even writes ''I no longer understand the observation of Colman
(1988: 121) that ...'', which must tempt readers to respond ''If you don’t
understand what you wrote yourself, how are we expected to understand what you
write now?''  When she quotes others, sometimes she adds wording such as ''I
will forbear to comment''.  In English this is usually code for ''This is
obviously wrong'', but here it is not clear whether that is what Colman means
(if so, what is obvious to her was not always obvious to me).

Overall I was disappointed by this book.  I learned a certain amount I did not
know before about Anglo-Saxon personal names, but not as much as I had hoped. 
And I have no way of judging whether the features of Colman’s mental
onomasticon reflect human naming behaviour in general, pre-Christian
Anglo-Saxon naming behaviour in particular, or just accidental properties of
the extant corpus of Old English inscriptions.


ABOUT THE REVIEWER

Geoffrey Sampson studied Chinese at Cambridge and linguistics and computing at
Yale. After working in the corpus linguistics group at Lancaster University,
he held the linguistics chair at Leeds and was later a professor of
informatics at Sussex University. Since retirement from Sussex he has been a
research fellow in the Linguistics department of the University of South
Africa. His books include ''Liberty and Language'', ''Schools of
Linguistics'', ''Writing Systems'', ''English for the Computer'', ''The
'Language Instinct' Debate'', and (with Anna Babarczy) ''Grammar Without
Grammaticality''.








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