Toponymy and Ancient History
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
chapter 1 Toponymy and Ancient History 1 The Unit of Study: The Placename Linguistically, toponyms are proper nouns. They refer to one unique object and are therefore separate from the general lexicon in that they do not necessarily have lexical meaning but have a ‘unique intended referent’.1 Proper nouns are distinct from general vocabulary in that their meaning need not necessarily correspond to its use in language.2 A toponym is a proper noun that applies to a specific location. The theory of studying placenames is called toponymy, a branch of onomastics. Most linguists accord no distinction between the terms ‘toponym’ and ‘placename’ and accordingly both are used interchangeably in this work.3 In Egyptian, as in all languages, there is the general definitional problem of how to distinguish between a placename and general geographic vocabulary. The task of identifying placenames in the Egyptian script is made somewhat easier by the practice of appending toponymic determinatives ( , , or ) to placenames. Unfortunately, these signs in themselves do not mark proper nouns, as they could also be used for general geographical vocabulary like, ‘town’, ‘mountain’, and ‘river’. Capitalisation of initial letters in English is only one method of indicat- ing specific referents in written language. Other languages may add morph- emes to indicate that a word or phrase should be treated as typologically spe- cific or unique.4 The phenomenon of ‘proper names’ has been the subject of much debate in linguistics and philosophy. Current research emphasises 1 R. Coates, ‘names’, in R. Hogg & D. Dennison (eds), A History of the English Language (Cam- bridge, 2006), 312–351. 2 W. van Langendonck, Theory and Typology of Proper Names (Berlin, 2007), 116. 3 L. Hill, Georeferencing: The Geographic Associations of Information (Cambridge; London, 2006), 110 defines a ‘toponym’ as subordinate to a placename, with the toponym ‘often being an administrative modifier’. Such a definition fails in most languages and belongs to the jar- gon and hierarchy of government databases. Almost all philologists and linguistics use these terms interchangeably. 4 For different morpho-syntactic strategies in proper nouns, see C. Lyons, Definiteness (Cam- bridge, 1999), 121ff. and D. Nash & J. Simpson, ‘Toponymy: Recording and Analysing Place- names in a Language Area’,in N. Thieberger (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Linguistic Research (Oxford, 2012), 399. It should be emphasised that unlike English, some of these strategies occur in spoken language. © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2020 | doi:10.1163/9789004422216_003 6 chapter 1 proper names as being driven by reference rather than descriptive elements. In other words, the proper name simply has to apply or ‘belong’ to one unique thing rather than describe it.5 While this is true, the degree of descriptive con- tent in a name is wholly dependent on the namer(s) and the manner in which something is named. This act of baptismal ‘bestowal’ is an important social process because it represents a tacit agreement by a group as to what to name a person, place, or thing.6 From the perspective of typological linguistics, van Langendonck distinguishes two types of such bestowal processes:7 1) An ad hoc active process, where a pre-existing ‘proprial lemma’ is assigned to a referent, e.g. assigning the name ‘John’ to a child at birth. The referred object (in this example a person) need not have any relationship with the etymology of ‘John’. 2) A gradual passive process, where an often descriptive appellation is ‘se- mantically bleached’ into a proper noun, e.g. ‘Oxford’ from ‘(the) ford of oxen’. Van Langendonck’s methods of naming remain to be tested against Egyptian data, or many corpora, and it may be that their nuances are at odds with cul- turally specific placenaming practices. In Egyptian toponymy, the process of marking a lexeme as ‘proper’ can be marked textually by the transition from a general lexeme with its own classifier, to one that uses one of the toponymic classifiers , , or , for example i҆wn ‘pillar’ to i҆wn.w ‘(the) pillars [place]’Heliopolis. Thus the classifiers reveal more than just orthographic and semantic differences, but could be considered on occasion to mark the shift of common noun to proper noun. However, the use of toponymic classifiers was not confined to proper nouns and could also be applied to general geographic vocabulary, and thus in Egyp- tian hieroglyphs there is no sure way of discerning a specific placename over a general term. One may duly question the notion of whether a ‘proper noun’ is an explicit category in Hieroglyphic Egyptian. Beyond the toponymic determ- inatives there is also for personal names, but again this does not specifically mark a proper noun, as it can be used on any lexeme under the semantic head- ing of [person], e.g. ḥm ‘priest’. Indeed, the Egyptian word for ‘name’, rn, generally refers to contexts that would indicate a proper noun.8 To know the rn 5 S. Bean, ‘Ethnology and the Study of Proper Names’, Anthropological Linguistics 22 (1980), 305–306. 6 S. Kripke, ‘Naming and necessity’, in D. Davidson & G. Harman (eds), Semantics of Natural Language (Dordrecht, 1972), 253–355. 7 van Langendonck, Theory and Typology of Proper Names, 322. 8 This meaning of rn is supported by its use for not only personal names, but also for all classes.