TO THE QUESTION OF SOME GEOGRAPHICAL NAMES INTERPRETATION IN BRITAIN COUNTRY STUDYING COURSE
Journal Title: Записки з романо-германської філології - Year 2014, Vol 1, Issue
Abstract
The article addresses the questions of geographical names’ interpretation and the difficulties which may occur while working with them, due to various linguistic origins and changes in language and culture which have caused the original meaning to be lost. Some important points in geographical names’ interpretation are revealed, that is important in the work with texts in Britain country studying course. The purpose of the article is to review some features of interpretation of place names that may occur when working with country studies course texts. Geographical names like proper names are the phenomena, which draw scientific interest due to the specifics of their formation and functioning in the language. The system of proper names as a result of centuries of nomination is known to be a set of various onomastic models, whose origin is primarily associated with extralinguistic factors, such as ancient traditions and customs of nomination, primordial cults and ideas, different ethno-cultural processes that occurred in the history of the community. It is not by mere chance that scholars consider the formation of proper names as a variety of coding historical and cultural information. Some of the main problems of interpretation of geographical names are as follows: 1) the inability to track the language of origin of the name, for example, some names may be equally of Old English or of Celtic origin. 2) the difference in the word order in the name: in the Germanic languages, and thus in Old English and Old Norse, the substantive is often preceded by its modifier, such as "north farm" - Norwich - (Norfolk). Celtic names are characterised by a reverse word order, where the first element is a notion that is described (hill, valley, farm, etc.) such as "settlement of the Cuebris" - Tregonebris (Cornwall) "Mouth of the Dee" Aberdeen (Scotland). 3) lost meaning: the interpretation of certain place names can be difficult if the motivation of the name is no longer obvious. For example, the city of Whichford (Warwickshire) - "ford of Hwicce" (an Anglo-Saxon kingdom during the Heptarchy), but the location of this ford was lost. 4) polysemantic words: some elements of the names, such as suffixes wich and wick, can have many meanings. Generally suffixes wich / wick / wyke denote a farm or settlement, for example Keswick (Cumbria) "cheese farm". However, some of the names are of Roman or early post-Roman origin. In this case, wich is a Latin word vicus "city", and the city itself seems to have been a trading point. On the coastline, the suffix wick is often interpreted by the Scandinavian origin, meaning "bay" or "entance" (Lerwick (Scotland)). All these factors must be taken into consideration when interpreting place names, which is very important when working with text in the course of British studies. Geographical names, of course, have a stable correspondence in all the world languages (which is conditioned primarily by geographic and cartographic needs), but the associations connected with some objects are part of the national culture and sometimes may be unknown outside it. Further research may deepen the study of proper names interpretation and help to use of the obtained information in the course of British studies
Authors and Affiliations
O. B. Alekseeva, T. A. Ananiychuk
Keywords
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