What IS a Name? Reflections on Onomastics *

William Bright

45 citations0/0 files stored

No readable copy stored yet — this record is metadata only.

No open-access location is known for this record yet.

Literature note Cite in a project Citation map

Linguistics and Language Studies Language and Culture Categorization, perception, and language

Abstract

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).

Paper brief

Loading…

Cite this work

Citation unavailable for this work.

BibTeX RIS CSL-JSON

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Citations in this library

Citation map →

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 45 citations exist upstream.

References

1998Wisdom Sits in Places: Landscape and Language among the Western Apache 1997Senses of Place 1984The Repeated Morph Constraint: Toward an Explanation 1993International encyclopedia of linguistics , vols. 1–4. Edited by William Bright. New York & Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992. Pp. xvi, 429; viii, 440; viii, 456; viii, 482. Cloth $395.00, £250.2000A Dictionary of Creek/Muskogee: With Notes on the Florida and Oklahoma Seminole Dialects of Creek

Cited by

2015Ubiquitous place names Standardization and study in Indonesia 2014Anglicized place names in Ghana: The case of towns in the Tarkwa Mining Area 2023An Onomastic Analysis of Cross-Cultural differences in English Textbooks at Intermediate Level in Punjab 2012An Ethnographic Analysis of Names of Round Characters in Wole Soyinka’s The Strong Breed

Explore the map →

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.

Imported from OpenAlex (CC0) — nothing here is generated.