Field-Collecting in Onomastics

Abstract

WHETHER ONE PURSUESTHE history of an individual name, is engaged the establishment of a private collection of names of a certain kind or area, or is involved the setting up of an official, central and comprehensive archive of names, such as the place-names of a county, a state, or a whole country, the process is likely to involve at least four, and possibly even five, stages which, more often than not, follow each other chronologically, although they may sometimes happen almost simultaneously: (1) Registration, (2) Documentation, (3) Identification, (4) Interpretation, and perhaps (5) Publication. In other words, the days of the map-and-dictionary method, which allowed the so-called placename scholar to move from stage one (registration) to stages four and five (interpretation and publication), without due, or any, attention to the intermediate phases, are over. Only patient work on stages one through three will ultimately permit convincing interpretation (not simply etymologizing) of the onomastic material collected and studied, whether as part of toponymic or anthroponymic research; admittedly, the study of place-names requires usually more extensive work the documentation phase with regard to both the scrutiny of written sources and collection in the field. This last statement makes it clear that we regard the activity described as Field Collecting Onomastics mainly as one aspect of the stage of documentation name studies, while at the same time recognising that this selfsame activity may very well contribute also to stages one (registration) and three (identification), and possibly even to stage four (interpretation). Certainly all four phases should always be borne mind, whereas the main emphasis is obviously and generally going to be on the way which fieldwork can help to increase and improve the documentation available for a name or group of names, thus laying a sound foundation for their proper and acceptable interpretation. As has become apparent recent years, the onomastic sciences have proven to be so much more than a handmaiden of linguistics, and the reduction of a name to a lexical item, accompanied by the establishment of its word