The House as an Object of Naming in the Turkish Urban Onomasticon: Structural and Semantic Analysis

Abstract

The article explores structural and semantic features of names of houses (oikodomonyms) in the Turkish language. The author proceeds from studying individual names’ motivations, contexts of their usage, and functional meaning (compared to the corresponding Russian designations) to the description of the general urbanonymic formula of Turkish house names. Typically, the name’s affiliation to this class is indicated by the element apartment (borrowed from French) which is used in modern Turkish to refer to the buildings intended for rental housing. In Turkish grammar, appellative nouns occur in postposition and agree with the complemented onym that specifies the nominated object. With names of houses, when these derive from other titles — a personal name or a sea name, the onymic component is formed through appellative onymization or transonomization and can consist of one or several elements with a variable degree of complexity. The study identifies typical patterns of house naming: “possessive” names, names verbalizing the concept of ‘home,’ reference names formed by metonymic transfer, “panegyric” names with double nomenclature element, communicative “greeting” names. The cultural and historical context of Turkish oikodomonymy reveals itself in less common yet present “memorial” names commemorating remarkable events. Another peculiar group is “associative” house names conditioned by the appearance of the building. There is a strong influence of extralinguistic factors in the urban onomasticon of Instanbul: the names of houses reflect cultural and historical traditions of the people, features of the city’s natural landscape, the multi-ethnic composition of the population of the metropolis. The large scope of this category of onyms, the variety of semantic patterns and the functions it displays, as well as extensive, continuously replenished vocabulary, brings Turkish house names into a separate and well-established microsystem within the Turkish urban toponymicon.