The Restructuring of Christian Personal Names in the Pre-National Period: Names ending in -a, -ija (-‘ja)

• Main Author: Irina M. Ganzhina
• Format: Article
• Language: Russian
• Published: Izdatelstvo Uralskogo Universiteta 2013-12-01
• Series: Voprosy Onomastiki
• Subjects: Russian language; regional historical anthroponymy; Christian personal names; paradigmatic class; full form of a personal name; canonical name; qualitative; formant; pseudo-morpheme; word-formation type
• Online Access: http://onomastics.ru/sites/default/files/VO_2013_2(15)/Ganzhina%20Onomastic_2_2013_sm-6.pdf

The article opens a series of publications analyzing the derivation within a regional system of Christian personal name forms in the Pre-National period. With reference to the anthroponyms recorded in 16-17th centuries Tver business documents, the author focuses on the ways of structural changes of the full forms of male Christian personal names in everyday communication. The object of analysis in the first article of the series is one paradigmatic class of full Christian personal names, namely those ending in -a, -ija (-‘ja). In the real communication, the stock of full popular and informal forms of names as well as (and even to a greater degree) of qualitative forms was not homogeneous, being represented by numerous different phonetic and morphological variants due to fictitious segmentations and formal changes of the anthroponymic stems. The author reveals word-formation mechanisms which enabled foreign personal names to integrate into the onomastic system of the Russian language and caused many colloquial forms of names with formally modified (truncated, lengthened or rearranged) pseudo-morphemes to emerge. The structural rearrangements and formally determined associative correlations in the anthroponymic word-formation eliminated differences between full and qualitative forms because both of them could include the same elements. The structural rearrangements of names were accompanied by phonetic changes. These varieties, both morphological and phonetic, create the unique anthroponymic pattern of any region.