Introduction

Abstract

Introduction Douglas R. Parks This special issue of Anthropological Linguistics contains ten articles on personal names in Native languages of North America. All but one of these articles are revised versions of papers originally presented at the special session "American Indian Personal Names: A Neglected Lexical Genre" at the annual meeting of the Society for the Study of the Indigenous Languages of the Americas (SSILA) in Portland, Oregon, on 7 January 2012.1 There is no modern, comprehensive linguistic description of American Indian naming systems. Published sources of names are primarily lists compiled by anthropologists, linguists, and historians. Even though personal names are an integral part of the languages and cultures of Native peoples, linguists usually do not document names for the languages they study: they do not utilize names as data for their grammars, and they generally do not include names in their dictionaries. The purpose of the special session was to bring together a group of Americanist linguists who have an interest in personal names in the languages they study; contributions were selected to represent the diversity of naming systems found in Native North American language families and to enable the participants to identify major issues in the study of names. The resulting articles describe the salient linguistic and semantic features of the names in these languages, illustrating how names are important semantic and grammatical domains in Native American languages, forming systems within the larger linguistic context, and why their study is essential for language documentation—for morphological and syntactic analysis, and for the compilation of richer dictionaries. They also illustrate how for most North American groups, rich archival corpora of names are available that have rarely been utilized by linguists and exemplify the methods and challenges of studying them. Even though personal names are a relatively neglected subject in North American linguistics and anthropology, significant work has been done over the years; some of the more noteworthy contributions may be mentioned here. The earliest linguist to give notable attention to personal names on the Plains was James Owen Dorsey, who beginning in 1871 devoted more than twenty years to documenting the Dhegiha and other Siouan languages. He recorded hundreds of personal names for each, but he published only one article, "Indian Personal Names" (1890). Although he planned to write a monograph on Siouan personal names, he died before completing it. Today his manuscripts are archived primarily in the National Anthropological Archives. [End Page 1] Other early linguists working on the Plains included C. C. Uhlenbeck; he published "Geslachts- en Persoonsnamen der Peigans" (1912), in which he cites the names of Piegan bands and a representative number of individuals' personal names, and discusses the historical incidents upon which the names were based. Edward Sapir (1924) compiled a list of ninety-four Sarsi names that he published in phonetic transcription, together with literal and free English translations, and then grouped into seven semantic categories: geographical references, tribal names, war names, names referring to horses and riding, names based on incidents or objects, and names referring to personal characteristics. Later in the century, James A. Goss (1973) reported on his attempt to develop a model for the naming practices of the Southern Ute Indians of Colorado that would enable him to predict, on the basis of a set of binary features, the sex, age, kin affiliations, and shamanistic powers from a name itself. Throughout the early twentieth century a small number of linguists and anthropologists who engaged in fieldwork with particular groups recorded lists of names, some of which were published, while others remain unpublished. For example, in the Southwest, the Franciscan Fathers at St. Michael's Mission on the Navajo Reservation documented various aspects of the language. In 1910, they published An Ethnologic Dictionary of the Navaho Language, an innovative linguistic work in which the entries have English head words arranged according to a vast array of cultural topics and activities as well as natural phenomena. Among them is a long entry entitled "Personal Names" that identifies seven categories of names: for boys, for girls, and for women; for men; for distinguished chiefs, treaty signers, and American residents; and tribal names. N. H. Winchell published in The Aborigines of...