6 Names

Names 313

Proper names are unlike other words of a language; indeed, it may be debated to what extent they really are part of the language with which they are conventionally associated. They obey the same synchronic constraints of phonology, with some marginal exceptions. Names change in ways related, though not always identical, to those applying to lexical words. Processes of reduction may be more radical in names than in corresponding lexical expressions: compare the older, defunct, pronunciation of the Northamptonshire village-name Silverstone /silsn/ (PN Nth 43) with that of the expression silver stone (which appears to have been the thirteenth-century name and which has nowadays been drafted in, with stress adjustment, to replace the older name form). Typically, on creation, proper names are formed of current lexical material and respect current principles of word formation. However, what invests a name with significance when it is created does not necessarily stay with it. In the roles they have to perform, names function independently of their etymological meaning and structure. County Oak (Sussex) has a name denoting a tree marking a county boundary. The oak has gone and the boundary has been moved; nevertheless the name serves perfectly well as a direct denotator of the place, and its written and spoken forms are semantically, synchronically, empty. It means only in an etymological way; it is not the sense which is transparent but its history. If I said that I lived by the pub, but that it isn’t there any more, you would accuse me of not using words in their normal function; when used, concrete nouns carry a presupposition of the existence of a relevant example of what they denote. But names carry no obligation to use any lexical content they appear to have in order to do referring. Much English name study is devoted to uncovering the original meanings of proper names. Since linguistic change may have the effect of making structured names opaque, and therefore of allowing any synchronically opaque string of sounds or letters to function as a proper name, it is possible to exploit this characteristic by inventing names consisting of arbitrary material. The consequences of this important point will surface from time to time below. It has been refined into the Onymic Default Principle, which states that the default interpretation of any string of linguistic units is a proper name (Coates, 2005a).

This might be taken as implying that the set of lexical items is divided into words and phrases, whose elements and structure are meaningful at the moment of usage, and names, whose elements and structures are not. However, many – probably most – names are meaningful on creation or bestowal, but cease to be meaningful as time passes. At what point do they stop being meaningful? We might argue that an act of name-bestowal has as a component a formal abrogation of meaning (i.e. of sense). If I had been a Puritan in seventeenth-century England, I might have called my daughter Charity, and I would have done so by appropriating to my own use the word charity in full recognition of its meaning. On baptism, that meaning would disappear insofar as the linguistic string was used to refer to my daughter. Charity as a lexeme would be uncompromised if the girl turned out uncharitable; and if she did, Charity would be no less valid as her name.

Names 315

Names as onomastic items do not inflect for number. Hale and Hales must be different places, despite having etymologies which are distinct only as regards number. If they do pluralise, names do not do so in virtue of any lexical content (three Middletons means ‘three places called Middleton’ and not ‘three middle villages’). If they are inherently plural, they do not singularise without loss of properness; the Yorkshire moor (as in the Yorkshire moor on which I grew up) is not the singular of The Yorkshire Moors, and the Pennine can only be interpreted as a jocular expression ‘a definite one of the things collectively called The Pennines’. Some morphosyntactic changes are found most often in names; it is not uncommon for oblique case forms (usually datives functioning as locatives) to replace original nominatives, as with Newsham mentioned above and as with Bury, which is usually from byrig, the dative singular of burg, whose nominative form turns up by strict subjection to known phonological changes as Borough. Some OE placenames have elements in specifier position that are neither the base form of a noun nor its genitive singular.

What kinds of things may bear names? All cultures appear to deploy names for individual persons and for places. They may be chosen from a traditional stock, as has been the case for most of the history of English personal names, or created at the point of bestowal from current linguistic materials and therefore meaningful to the bestower, as for example with Yoruba personal names. Instances of the latter type may in all cultures drift into the former, at first through the commemoration of people previously bearing a particular name. These names, however they are acquired, are not necessarily the sole or even dominant means of referring to the individual named. For instance, Koreans all bear personal names, but their traditional conversational way of referring to an adult person or even addressing them may be by an expression (teknonym) meaning ‘mother/father of [name of their eldest child]’, and similar though less systematic phenomena can be found in English too, for example in pro-names (generalised non-proper names that may act as name-surrogates) such as Mum and Dad. Place-names also appear to be a universal category, and may either evolve through conversational use from expressions descriptive of the site or be created and bestowed by deliberate acts.

Personal names appear to be the prototypical names, as all humans have overwhelming interest (1) in being able to refer conversationally to other humans with the expectation of uniquely identifying them in context, and (2) in catching the attention of other humans individually. Accordingly, personal names typically have both a referential and a vocative function. Their fundamental nature is also seen in the way they are applicable to other categories of individual, for instance animals. Places gain significance because we all move and act in space, so they gain significance through the way(s) in which they fit into human perceptions of landscape, townscape and starscape, which is what governs their naming. Other categories of object may bear proper names, and the more intimately associated