Book Description

Onomastics is an area of scholarly interest that has grown considerably in importance in recent years. Consequently, the 27th International Congress of Onomastic Sciences, held in 2021 in Kraków, Poland, gathered scholars from all over the world, active in all subfields of onomastic enquiry, as well as those exploring the areas bordering on other disciplines of the humanities. It thus became a venue for presenting state-of-the-art research in the study of proper names, proposing novel approaches and opening new vistas for future research. The present work is the third of the three volumes of conference proceedings that are the fruit of the congress. Being the most diverse thematically, it contains contributions on the general and applied aspects of onomastics, onymy in literature and other cultural texts, and chrematonyms. It ends with two reports. The volume comprises 30 individual articles, contributed by 35 scholars. The first section, devoted to general and applied onomastics, features texts concerned with ever-interesting questions relevant to all practitioners of the discipline: the essence of properhood, the meaning of proper names, and onomastic terminology. Scholars whose papers focused on applied onomastics were interested in problems occasioned by the translation of onyms, by their pronunciation in cross-cultural contact, and by the use of exonyms, drawing for exemplification on the Hungarian, German and Czech language material respectively. Literary onomastics in its broad definition constitutes by far the largest part of the volume. Contributors to this section represent diverse literatures, including Scottish, Russian, Polish, Czech and Nigerian. The scope and internal subdivisions of literary onomastics are discussed and the activities of the Italian Society for Literary Onomastics are presented. The name Dracula is analysed in depth, and so is the Old Prussian onym Patollo. Some researchers take a step into the wider realm of culture. Their attention is attracted by the names of spirits in the beliefs adhered to in Southwest China, by the proper names in a medieval Scottish document, by the onyms that personify hunger in Italian wartime epistolography, and by toponyms in video games. The third section deals with chrematonyms as diverse as names of railway locomotives in Britain, logonyms in Slovakia and perfume names in a Slovak online shop. The naming patterns of Chinese restaurants in Czechia are studied too, as well as the names of travel agencies in Germany, Ukraine and Poland. Finally, the reader is presented with two reports. One outlines new tendencies in Nordic socio-onomastics, while the other presents the new paradigm in the publication of “Onoma”, the journal of the ICOS. The book is a must not only for onomasticians, but also for researchers in related disciplines, ranging from history, via human geography or philosophy of language, to social studies. However, professionals active in naming will find it useful as well, since it provides a much-needed supranational perspective and enables cross-cultural comparisons.