Which out of the four?

The origin of family names in the light of cognitive semantics

Abstract

The article deals with the question of how historical proper names can be examined in the framework of cognitive semantics, and whether the theories of this field of study are compatible with those of traditional onomastics. To illustrate the complexity of the question the author focuses on the development of Hungarian family names. Distinctive name components functioned as the basis for later family names. These components can be divided into four groups: (i) names with filius (‘son of’), (ii) de (‘from’) + place name, (iii) names with dictus (‘known as’), (iv) patronymics (de genere) (‘from the kindred called’). Onomastics claims that a distinctive name component becomes a true family name when it becomes steady, for example, when Kovács (‘smith’) is not a smith by profession any more, when all members of a family bear the same distinctive name, etc. By adopting the framework of cognitive semantics, one must accept that naming is a cognitive act: out of the attributes of a person to be named the most characteristic feature is chosen to form
a name. When the feature ceases to refer to reality (a person called Kovács is not a smith any longer), the relationship between that feature and the person identified by it also dissolves and the distinctive name component becomes a family name. The paper examines what factors are responsible for this change in the case of the four name types and detects why of the wide choice of possible name forms one particular distinctive name becomes a family name. The author claims that both traditional and cognitive considerations, although their approaches and methods are different, reach the same conclusion. Furthermore, in the framework of cognitive semantics, many problems disregarded by traditional onomastics can be easily explained.