Urban names and etymological reinterpretation

• Authors: Justyna B. Walkowiak

Title variants

CS

Urbanonyma a etymologická reinterpretace

• Languages of publication: EN

Abstracts

EN

Etymological reinterpretation, less aptly referred to as folk etymology, is a cognitive process by which less familiar (”weak”) lexical units are ‒ on various levels of consciousness ‒ reassigned to other semantic, syntactic or inflectional categories under the influence of “stronger” words or patterns, more familiar to language users. This phenomenon can be observed not only in common nouns but also among proper names, though the latter are less often subjected to scholarly analysis in that respect. Moreover, while there exist studies of folk etymology in settlement names and microtoponyms, usually analysing legends of how names of towns, villages or landscape features originated, not as much attention has been so far devoted to this phenomenon in relation to urban naming in Poland. This article studies the etymological reinterpretation of Polish urban names (mostly those of streets). Drawing on Witold Cienkowski’s 1972 classic model of classifying the phenomena of folk etymology, it offers its adaptation to fit the specificity of hodonyms by replacing the category of meaning with that of motivation and by the inclusion of inflection as an additional factor. The proposed classification is illustrated with examples from Polish cities.

Keywords

EN

etymological reinterpretation; folk etymology; hodonyms; street names; urban names; Poland

Discipline

• PHILOLOGY_&_LINGUISTICS: PHILOLOGY & LINGUISTICS

• Publisher: Czech Ethnological Society
• Journal: Národopisný věstník
• Year: 2022
• Volume: 63
• Issue: 2
• Pages: 483-496
• Document type: ARTICLE

Contributors

author

Justyna B. Walkowiak

• Acta onomastica, redakce, Ústav pro jazyk český AV ČR, v.v.i., Letenská 4, 118 51 Praha 1, Czech Republic