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“I was coming to that,” the Knight said. “The song really is ‘A-sitting on a gate’: and the tune’s my own invention.”
Many books and articles have taken as their title the famous line from Shakespeare’s.
Romeo and Juliet: “What’s in a name?” I choose to raise a slightly different question:
“What is a name?” – not to answer the question definitively, of course, but simply to focus attention on some aspects of the problem. In doing so, I also want to focus attention on the field of onomastics, understood as the study of names. Such study is, in fact, carried out as part of several larger fields, including linguistics, ethnography, folklore, philology, history, geography, philosophy, and literary scholarship. In Europe, especially in Germany, it is a well recognized branch of philology, as witness the three-volume encyclopedic survey of the field recently published there.
By contrast, in the US, onomastics is scarcely recognized as a scholarly field at all. To be sure, there is an organization called the American Name Society, which publishes a small journal called “Names,” but only a few linguists belong to the society, and most linguists have probably never heard of the organization or the journal. I myself have been interested in onomastics since my student days, and I have published articles in the journal “Names”; but even so, in 1992, when I edited the International Encyclopedia of Linguistics, it never occurred to me to plan for an article on names. Fortunately, the forthcoming second edition of that encyclopedia will repair my omission.
To begin with, the word name is often used to mean a term which can refer to anything, as when we say: “Banana is the name of a fruit,” or “Murder is the name of a crime.” In this sense, the word name is virtually synonymous with the word noun; indeed, in some languages, the same term can used for both, e. g., French nom. In this sense, the relationship between a name and that to which it refers has been the topic of an extensive literature written by philosophers specializing in semantics (cf. Zabeeh 1968, Lehrer 1992, Lamarque 1994). These writers have had much to say about the material in the famous quotation from Through the Looking Glass. I must admit to ignorance of this large topic, and so I will go on to more limited aspects of names and naming.
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