A Book of Friends by Dorothy Driver

Author:Dorothy Driver
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The Text Publishing Company
Published: 2020-01-11T00:00:00+00:00

Onoma and Anomie

Rajend Mesthrie

In all the deserved attention to J. M. Coetzee’s literary and critical output, it is sometimes forgotten that he studied and taught linguistics as well. John was my first inspirational teacher of linguistics, and I am forever indebted to him for encouraging me to pursue the discipline further at his alma mater, the University of Texas at Austin. I recall his allowing me to study kinship semantics in Zulu and Tamil for an honours essay at the University of Cape Town, while all around me were writing on more ‘English’ literary topics. In this essay I examine name changes among Indian South Africans and the wealth of insights that onomastics (the study of names) affords us in matters of cultural resilience and change. There are two reasons why name changes are of interest within the community under study. Firstly, there was a gulf between traditional village naming patterns in nineteenth-century India and bureaucratic Western expectations in respect of personal names and surnames. Secondly, by the close of the twentieth century, conversion to Christianity and/or the growth of a Western orientation led to a striking array of choices for first names, deserving of the interest of linguists and cultural specialists.

A good starting point is to examine how names have featured in linguistic studies. The three major points of departure are structural/generative, sociolinguistic/anthropological and etymological/sociohistorical. The first perspective asks whether names fit into the structural patterning of language, and if so how. The second focuses on community practices of name-giving, in respect of cultural and class preferences of the bestowers, and also in terms of their hopes for the ‘bestowed’. Topics like gendered names, nicknames, naming sequences and names bestowed at different life stages fall under this category. The third, sociohistoric approach focuses on issues like etymology, naming fashions and contact between different systems of naming.

Structural and generative linguists pay little attention to names since they lack the general denotation characteristic of common nouns. Thus, while the set of entities picked out by a common noun like house have a defining shared denotation, this cannot be said of a proper name like Philip, which has no common underlying meaning. Two entities referred to as Philip would have to be coded in our minds as Philip1 and Philip2. Hence scholars—going back to J. S. Mill—sometimes aver that proper names have no sense at all (where sense refers to linguistic or language-internal meaning, as opposed to the referential meaning that connects with an object or concept in the outside world). For John Anderson, author of the most recent full-length linguistic treatise on the topic, names are therefore not a linguistic category but a mode of reference. They are special nouns which do not enter into typical relations characteristic of other nouns, being neither definite nor indefinite. At best they’d form a part of a lexicon, an ‘onomasticon’, consisting of dedicated inactive names, where ‘inactive’ refers to a lack of formal linguistic relations with other elements of language.

While personal (or first) names

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