Evolution of Yelabuga City Ergonyms

Abstract

The article analyzes Yelabuga’s ergonymicon, the evolution of ergonyms from 1897 to 2022 and compares three layers of Yelabuga’s ergonymicon in order to reveal the formation regularities of proper names. The study is based on advertising texts, the newspapers “The Kama Listok Advertising”, “The Stalin’s Way”, “The For the Five-Year Plan”, “The New Kama”, as well as the names of current city infrastructure facilities. Our research is based on following methods: the comparative method in the study of the linguistic facts, historical and cultural processes, the analysis of the concepts in finding correspondences and regularities in the formation of ergonyms, the contextual analysis method in the study of periodical publications of the 19th-20th centuries and the transformation method in identifying the functional possibilities of onyms. The article gives a number of examples (300 names of urban objects in the 19th – 21st centuries). In the course of the study, we propose our own classifications of ergonyms. The theoretical significance of the analyzed material lies in clarifying the concept of “ergonym” and the classification of ergonyms. The practical value lies in the fact that for the first time an attempt has been made to study the emergence peculiarities of ergonyms and the regularities of their change over time. The results confirm the idea that ergonyms are a linguistically flexible category of words, which change over time, responding to the needs of society.