ONOMASTIC ETUDE: COLLECTIVE PROPER NAMES OF MYTHOLOGICAL CREATURES (TYPOLOGICAL ASPECT)

Abstract

The article is devoted to a typological analysis of the names of some supernatural entities in mythology. Mythology embraces the whole range of stories, sacred beings and theologies which make up the religious backdrop of belief systems. Myths have many functions and concerns. These issues can be explained by means of the construction of a mythology; the personification of natural forces and their endowment with names often forms the foundation for polytheistic belief systems. Unlike the individual proper names of mythological characters, these lexical formations act as collective proper names, e.g. nymphs (Greek nymphe ‘young girl’, ‘bribe’) – female spirits of nature, either immortal or very long-lived. They were visualized as beautiful young girls with an amorous disposition, e.g., Oreads were mountain-nymphs (oros); Alseids were nymphs of groves (alsos); Naiades were water-nymphs, several kinds of tree-nymphs: Dryads, originally nymphs of oak trees (drys); Hamadryads, Meliads. Nereids were sea-nymphs, daughters of Nereus, etc. Nymphs first appear in poetry by Homer, who calls them the daughters of Zeus. The degree of onomasticity for individual proper names and for collective proper names is different. It is smaller in the last group of mythonyms, which was the reason for their attribution by many authors to the appellatives, e. g., many a heroic genealogy has a nymph at its head as founder of the family. The boundary between proper names and appellatives is unsteady and fluid and the differences between them are quantitative. The reference of many plural lexical units to the onomastic or appellative category is subjective in nature and is based on an intuitive linguistic flair, rather than on rigid objective criteria.