Varia: Reconstruction of Nomina Loci Derived from Fruit Names Based on Toponymic Data

Authors:

Pages: 83-90

Abstract:

The naming of places according to local vegetation is a universal way of creating toponyms, a considerable part of which is derived from common names of localities, denoting ‘a place where a particular plant (fruit) grows’. Studying such toponyms can enrich the current locality-labelling data with new, hitherto unknown ones, as well as complete the pattern of the folk taxonomy of fruit. Nomina loci, as a separate word formation category, is well studied in both literary Bulgarian and its dialects. The present study aims to reconstruct the common names of localities, motivated by names of fruit, which have been preserved in Northern Bulgaria toponymy. There is a list of locality names derived from different kinds of toponyms. Some of these names expand the currently known ‘nomina loci’ word formation categories by providing new names. The analyses also show that the toponymy has preserved a fair number of archaic lexemes, formed through rare and antiquated suffixes with a locative function, which have not been registered in earlier research of locality names.

Keywords:

nomina loci, nomina collectiva, place names, fruit names.

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