VOLKER KOHLHEIM

Bayreuth

Research areas: personal-name studies, literary onomastics, name theory.

THE NOMEN, THE ALLONYM, AND NOMENATICS. ALSO A REVIEW OF SILVIO BRENDLER’S BOOK NOMEMATIK

The nomen, the allonym, and nomenatics. Notes on Silvio Brendler’s book Nomematik

I

If anything has characterized modern linguistics since around the beginning of the 20th century, it is the turn away from a purely historical study of language, as still defended apodictically by Hermann Paul. This departure from a purely historical-linguistic approach went hand in hand with an emphasis on synchrony as the preferred object of linguistic study and thus with a “reduction in the number of elementary descriptive units,” specifically “above all through the establishment of the concept of the phoneme in phonology [and] of the concept of the morpheme in morphology.” (Thümmel 2005: 651). However far contemporary linguistics may by now have moved from classical structuralism, these terms—which can be joined by the lexeme—and the theoretical assumptions associated with them, such as distinctive features and oppositions, as well as analytical procedures such as segmentation, have nevertheless become indispensable elements of the discipline’s repertoire. It is striking, then, that onomastics still largely seems to consider itself entitled to dispense with this conceptual toolkit. This deficiency, or methodological lag, may be due to the fact that toponomastics is still largely oriented toward linguistic history and etymology, and …

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ger von Bedeutung sein (vgl. aber Kohlheim, Hengst 2004), er macht sich aber vor allem in der Anthroponomastik negativ bemerkbar. Insbesondere bei Untersuchungen, die auch statistische Fragestellungen implizieren, bei denen also immer die Frage eine Rolle spielt, welche Namenformen als zusammengehörig, als „identisch“ anzusehen sind, resultiert das Fehlen eines methodologisch konsequenten und auf der Höhe der allgemeinen Linguistik stehenden Begriffs- und Methoden-inventars oft genug in zumindest terminologischer Unklarheit, wenn nicht sogar in angreifbaren Resultaten.

A structuralist-influenced conceptual inventory capable of remedying this situation has existed since 1977. Inspired by a proposal by Rudolf Freudenberg (Freudenberg 1967/68), Volker Kohlheim’s study of Regensburg forenames from the 13th and 14th centuries set alongside the pair Phonem and Allophon the onomastic pair Nomem and Allonom (Kohlheim 1977: 71). This filled a terminological gap. The initial purpose of this terminological coinage was to make sense of the variety of onymic forms encountered in the study of late medieval Regensburg forenames. It was necessary to determine whether attested forms such as Gumbertus, Cumbertus, Gumprecht, Gumpprecht, Gumplinus were to be treated as one name or several in statistical studies of names (Kohlheim 1977: 36). The decisive idea was that the analysis should not proceed according to etymological criteria, which surely no longer mattered to 13th- and 14th-century speakers/writers, but that name identities should correspond to the awareness of name users and represent their onymic competence. In principle, therefore, the linguistic analysis of Regensburg’s late medieval naming system was to proceed in the same way as the study of the onymic system of an unknown language. Kenneth Lee Pike had already provided the theoretical framework for this “ethnological” approach. Following Pike (1967), we call an investigative method “etic” if it proceeds according to criteria imposed from outside on the system under investigation. Such a method is justified as a starting point, but can only be provisional, since it does not necessarily correspond to the actual state of affairs. Two name forms that we call “identical” on the basis of their common etymological origin may well be understood as two separate names by speakers of a past—or even present—era. The task, then, is to reconstruct the onymic competence of speakers in a past period. If successful, we obtain, in Pike’s terminology, “emic” units. A contemporary example: the names Adelheit, Aleida and

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Elke all go back to adal-heit, but today they are certainly understood as three different names. Conversely, in medieval Regensburg, forms that etymologically derive from two different Hebrew etymologies, Matheus and Mathyas, were perceived as interchangeable, as the attested sequence hern Mathyas dez Wakchers hausfrawe (a. 1341), Matheis der Wacher (a. 1342), Matheus der Wachker (a. 1342), bei Metlein dem Wocher (a. 1345) shows (Kohlheim 1977: 511), since each refers to one and the same person. We must therefore assume that speakers in Regensburg at that time possessed a mental unit that enabled them to recognize the name forms just cited as identical. We call this abstract mental unit a Nomem, and its realizations in speech or writing Allonom (Kohlheim 1977: 71). Crucially, the Nomem must be understood as an abstract mental unit. Its notation is therefore purely conventional. This has not always been understood in later literature on the Nomem. Thus, in Kohlheim (1977), the Nomeme were represented as Old High German etyma (that is, “kuon-rāt” as the Nomem for the Allonome Chunrat, Konrad, Chuntz, Kunz, etc.). A later article proposed writing the Nomem between slashes, by analogy with the conventional notation of phonemes. For the Allonome Mathyas, Matheis, Matheus and Metlein cited above, the notation /MATHEIS/ suggests itself for the Nomem underlying all these Allonome (Kohlheim 2001: 148.) Yet this notation too carries the risk that /MATHEIS/ will be regarded as the “most relevant” form. As early as 1966, Rudolf Freudenberg had proposed dispensing with letters that evoke “misleading associations” with phonetic values in the notation of phonemes, in favor of entirely new symbols (Freudenberg 1966: 9). One could therefore imagine introducing the notation /M/ or even a numeral to represent the Nomem /MATHEIS/.

When the concepts Nomem and Allonom were first defined, behaviorist methods predominated in linguistics. The Regensburg name material was therefore analyzed using the methods of American distributionalism, as developed by Zellig S. Harris (Harris 1969; cf. Kohlheim 1977: 67–80). “Mentalistic-psychological” views were considered obsolete. From today’s perspective, by contrast, one can observe that the introduction of the concept Nomem was in a certain sense an anticipation of cognitivist positions. If Freudenberg wrote in 1966, “Phonemes are concepts obtained through mental synthesis” (Freudenberg 1966: 13), the same applied to the concept of the Nomem, defined a short time later. From today’s

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From a cognitivist perspective, it can be stated: Nomemes correspond to the concepts that exist in speakers’ brains concerning individual name expressions.¹

It may have been noticed that the series of allonyms cited above—Gumbertus, Cumbertus, Gumprecht, Gumpprecht and Gumplinus—contains two different types, which we traditionally call “full forms” and “short forms.” As early as his 1977 study, Volker Kohlheim had proposed that these be called realization types: “Although the realization type still belongs to the virtual [that is, emic] level, the speaker or writer chooses the particular realization type only in the actual speaking or writing situation, and this choice is in every case situation- or context-dependent and depends on the speaker’s/writer’s intention as well as on the expectation that the speaker/writer assumes their communication partner to have” (Kohlheim 1977: 79f.). Thus, a speaker/writer wishing to realize the Nomem /MARGARETE/ must decide whether to do so using the allonym Margarete, which belongs to a formal level (domain) of communication, or to use one of the allonyms Grete, Gretchen, Gretel, Gretelchen, which belong to an informal level (domain) of communication and linguistically to the realization type “hypocoristic.” Pragmatic-linguistic aspects thus also enter the model presented, which is primarily a system-linguistic one, since the realization type used by the speaker depends on the particular pragmatic situation.

The topic of reference, now so central to onomastic theory, played at most an indirect role in the 1977 study. The aim was to analyze the names in the corpus of the two volumes of the Regensburg Urkundenbuch, which chronologically extends to 1378, and prepare them for statistical studies of names—strictly corpus-based and internal to the system. Accordingly, two different name forms were regarded as “identical” if they occurred in the same “environment.” By far the majority of given names—and these alone were at issue—occurred in a name syntagma that normally consisted of three elements: given name + definite article + byname. For women, the byname was additionally followed by the feminine suffix -in. If two name forms, such as Stepfan and Stepfel, appeared interchangeably with the byname der Enichl, the

¹ Vgl. zu kognitiven Wortkonzepten Rickheit, Weiss, Eikmeyer (2010: 73–76). Silvio Brendler (2008: 75) allerdings gesteht erst der späteren Version des onomastischen Ansatzes, wie sie in Kohlheim, Hengst (2004) vorliegt, ein kognitivistisches Herangehen an die Problematik zu. Wortwörtlich hieß es aber bereits in der Fassung Kohlheim (1977: 71): Diejenige sprachliche Einheit, die es dem kompetenten Sprecher einer Sprachgemeinschaft erlaubt, verschiedene Namensformen als identisch zu erkennen, nennen wir ‚Nomem’ [...]“. „Erkennen“ aber ist eine kognitive Leistung.

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“identity” had been established: that is, the two (realized) allonyms Stepfan and Stepfel belonged to one (virtual) Nomem /STEPHAN/. This method strictly followed the distributionalism formulated by Harris (1969). Although it was assumed that the name forms recorded in the documents of the Urkundenbuch referred to (then) actual persons, and thus had a referential function, this played only an indirect role in determining the Nomems. One further consequence of this highly corpus-oriented perspective was that another consideration, now at the forefront, played no role at all: since the task was to analyze an inventory of names—specifically, given names—the idea that “a” name could refer to only one person could not even arise. In discussing how three allonyms that are largely similar in form but occur in different “environments”—that is, in name syntagmas alongside different bynames—could nevertheless be assigned to one Nomem (the procedure’s details cannot be discussed here), it was stated: “If we were to apply only the criterion of discourse meaning [that is, the environment in realization], the three allonyms [Ruger der Pochner, Ruger der Prunnhofer, Ruger vor der Chappel] would not be identical and would consequently have to be assigned to three different Nomems. This conclusion, however, is absurd: as is well known, every speech community uses far fewer names than the number of entities it names” (Kohlheim 1977: 72). It is not that the problematic nature of this statement went unrecognized at the time; rather, it was countered by reference to Eugenio Coseriu (1967: 268: “[...] los nombres propios pueden ser multívocos, pero son siempre monovalentes”) and Farhang Zabeeh (1968: 57: “We may use, for example, [...] ‘Joan’ to refer to many women”). Essentially, this is the still-current problem in name theory and philosophy of names concerning the tension between onymic “monovalence and class formation” (Windberger-Heidenkummer 2011). We no longer speak so unproblematically of “a name.” Today we have a more differentiated terminology: in the case cited, Willy Van Langendonck (2007) would speak not of a “name” but of a “proprial lemma,” while Silvio Brendler, in the book to be introduced shortly, uses the term “Archinomem.” At the time, however, the Nomems to be identified were also understood as lemmas in a historical name inventory.

An expanded version of the theory also introduced the concept of the Archinomem (Kohlheim 2001), which we will encounter again in Part II of this article, in a different sense from Kohlheim’s. The application to family names was considered only briefly (Kohlheim 2005), while the concepts norm and allonym in toponomastics were discussed by Karlheinz Hengst following Kohlheim.

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(Kohlheim, Hengst 2004; Kohlheim, Hengst 2006). Nomematic terminology was also occasionally used by other authors, most recently by Renāte Siliņa-Piņķe (2009), and was included in Wilfried Seibicke’s handbook Die Personennamen im Deutschen (2008:101).

II

In 2008, Brendler presented in his book Nomematik. Identitätstheoretische Grundlagen der Namenforschung (insbesondere der Namengeschichte, Namenlexikographie, Namengeographie, Namenstatistik und Namenstheorie) a thoroughly expanded and refined theory for establishing onymic identities. This substantial work (448 pages, numerous illustrations, 6 maps) is easy to navigate thanks to its name and subject indexes (421–428; 429–448); a section entitled “Concretizations” (321–391) also documents the names discussed visually. The extensive bibliography (393–419) attests to the author’s thoroughness: he seems to have overlooked hardly any work related to the book’s subject matter, narrowly or broadly construed.

At the very beginning of the “Introduction” (25–52), we read: “The term ‘name identity’ denotes the occurrence of one and the same name at different points in time in communication, that is, in language use” (31). The terms “isonymy” and “onymic identity” are used synonymously. For two (or more) names to be identical, or “isonymic,” they must have the same etymological origin and name one and the same object—that is, they must be “referentially identical,” or coreferential. This already identifies the most important difference from Kohlheim’s works, in which “identity” meant formal identity. Identity in use, or coreferentiality, was there merely the starting point for establishing Nomems, which, once identified, could indeed refer to several persons. For Brendler, this no longer constitutes onymic identity, but only homonymy (33).

Brendler makes a perceptive distinction between onymic identity (isonymy) and name sameness, and demonstrates that there are different kinds of onymic sameness (33–38): (1) etymological name equations; (2) formal equations (despite etymological difference), e.g., the German place names Koblenz < lat. Confluentes and Koblenz < Old Sorbian *Kobyl’no/* Kobyl’na ‘the settlement where there are mares’; (3) semantic name sameness, e.g., German Schwarza, English Blackwater; (4) referentially identical name equations, which can in turn be differentiated into those with the same etymology, e.g., German

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Germany, Danish Tyskland, with identical semantics, e.g. German Schwarzwasser, Old Sorbian *Čornica, and those in which only the object is the same, to which reference is made by names that differ formally, etymologically, and semantically, e.g. German Deutschland, English Germany, Finnish Saksa. Finally, there are also (5) “name-identical name equations,” in which all the partial equations just mentioned apply simultaneously, as in the examples from fifteenth-century Austria Bertl Menhart = Partl Menhart. Only the latter equations, Brendler argues, are “relevant to name-identity theory” (38). In considering onyms, Brendler distinguishes between the “perceptual level” and three “cognitive levels” (40f.): The (oral or written) concretizations of the onym are located at the perceptual level (for Kohlheim, these were the realized allonyms). The level of cognition is divided into the level of realizations, where different name concretizations are recognized as variants within an onymic system; the level of systematizations, where a system is formed in the minds of language users; and the level of archisystematizations, which arises through “thinking and speaking” about names. When we hear or read a name, we initially identify the object named by it “as a particular, but not more precisely specified individual” (44). In contrast to this act of “identification,” “identification” in the sense of determining the identity of an individual established by a name occurs when “ascertaining the identity of an individual fixed by a name” (44). In any case, Brendler rejects a “carrier-independent consideration of names”—“since it does not do justice to the nature of the name” (50).

Chapter 1 of the book (53–80), in a “historical overview of scholarship,” discusses the authors who used nomematic terminology before Brendler. As already explained, Kohlheim’s approach, focused on linguistic form, differs from Brendler’s above all in that, for Kohlheim, a Nomem can (in its realization) refer to infinitely many name-bearers. For Brendler, these are “homonymous Nomeme” (63). Still referring to Kohlheim (and Kohlheim, Hengst 2004), he proposes a more linguistically homogeneous terminology, replacing “Allonom” with “Nom” at the level of concretization, and “realization type” with “Allonom” (64). He then addresses the works published since Kohlheim (1977) that use nomematic terminology, and concludes that none of them takes into account what he considers the decisive criterion of functional identity; “apparently, one simply confuses etymological identity with name identity (takes isogeny for isonymy)” (80).

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Chapter 2 (81–170) is entitled “Nomematik”². What is crucial to the nomematic, that is, an emic, approach is viewing names within the system, with the name system understood, as already in Kohlheim (1998), as a subsystem of the lexical system, itself a subsystem of the linguistic system (82). Brendler calls the “description of the constitutive linguistic properties of names [...] as Nomeme,” that is, the description of their phonemic/graphemic form, “name grammar” (85). The units Nom, Allonom, and Nomem are redefined below: “A Nom is the concretization of a functionally and grammatically identical Nomem, while an Allonom constitutes the realization of a functionally and grammatically identical Nomem” (89). Two differences from Kohlheim’s model are evident here: whereas, for Kohlheim, a Nomem as a mere formal unit, as a “proprial lemma” in the sense of Van Langendonck (2007), could refer to several name-bearers at the level of realization, this is not the case in Brendler’s model. Second, in Brendler’s account, “names with different wordings that nevertheless name one and the same object [...] represent different Nomeme and thus different names” (103). This, of course, misses the intention of Kohlheim’s approach (1977). The point there was precisely to combine the different variants belonging to one Nomem—above all, short forms and pet forms of a full form—in accordance with the onymic competence of late-medieval name-givers and name-bearers, so that they could be used statistically. Brendler, by contrast, views short forms and pet forms as “independent” names and therefore speaks of “short-names and pet names” (103). If one does this and applies it in practice, however, it is not possible, for example, to study the distribution of saints’ names in the Middle Ages diachronically and diastratically in an appropriate way. The name (Nomem) that has no allomorphs, or only a few, would then always be statistically favored. Since in the Middle Ages the nomematization of allomorphs (unlike today) occurred only very rarely, such a procedure would thoroughly distort the picture.

In “lay or linguistic-scientific reflection on the relationships between names and/or name(s) forms” (112), we enter the cognitive level of “archisystematizations.” We arrive at “archinomems” when we think or speak about name forms that are actually or merely apparently related, before any reference has been fixed. Thus, utterances such as “I know two people with

² This term was introduced by Brendler as early as 2003 (81).

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the name Ronny” are not yet full-fledged names either (116). Archinomems may differ slightly in pronunciation or spelling (Brendler’s example is Gerit/Gerrit, p. 116). When claims are made about the diachrony of name forms, whether linguistically correct or not, Brendler speaks of “archiallonome” (118).

The following discussion concerns the mental processes involved in abstraction—that is, the progression from concretization to archisystematization—and its counterpart, the specification of nomematic units (126–128). The relationships between nomematic entities, especially isonymy and anisonymy, are also discussed (130–140). The following pages are likely to attract attention, as Brendler presents his concept of “Nomematik as a dynamic approach to language” (140–144). Here he attempts to move beyond Kohlheim’s approach, allegedly “concentrated entirely on synchrony” (140), by adopting a “panchronic” approach; however, he does not take into account that diachrony also played a decisive role in Kohlheim (1977), as a succession of synchronic layers.³ According to Brendler, the “dynamics of nomematic system analysis” arise from the “main driving forces of language dynamics: concretization, realization, and systematization” (141). Brendler does not explain in detail how diachronic change can be derived from this—initially synchronic—classification of mental processes. He rightly emphasizes the “difficulty of establishing the identity of linguistic units in diachrony” (142). Kohlheim (1977) also encountered this problem and attempted to solve it for the temporal continuum from 893 to 1378 by means of a succession of synchronic layers, in which phenomena of onymic change could then be observed, such as the splitting of one Nomem into two distinct ones or contamination, the merging of two Nomeme into one (Kohlheim 1977: 100–106). And when Brendler seeks on p. 144 to represent graphically the development of today’s place name ‘Chemnitz’ from “KAMENIZ” (around 1100) through “KEMENIZ” (around 1200) to “KEM(E)NIZ” (around 1300), he likewise resorts de facto to “synchronic layers,” just as Kohlheim (1977) was compelled to do for the Regensburg given names. In any case, this is not yet a “complex continuum,” as claimed on p. 143. Brendler is therefore right to write that “onomastics will [still] have to develop suitable methods for the diachronic study of dynamic name systems” (143). With his conceptual toolkit, he has already developed a useful instrument for this purpose, since onymic change will initially manifest itself in isolated concretizations-

³ Siehe Kohlheim (1977: 100–106): „Diachronischer Wandel des Namensystems“.

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manifest themselves, until he arrives at systematization via the realizations of allonyms. In doing so, one must take account of the “non-simultaneity within the simultaneous,” which is evident, for example, in fourteenth-century Regensburg in that the nomems /MATTHIAS/ and /MATTHÄUS/, insofar as they referred to contemporaneous persons, had been conflated into one nomem /MATHEIS/ (with different allonyms), whereas in contemporaneous document dates the names of the Apostle Matthias and of the Apostle and Evangelist Matthew were strictly distinguished (Kohlheim 1977: 279–281). It is precisely in phenomena of this kind that onymic change—in this case, the fusion of two nomems into a new one—becomes visible. The socio-onomastic category of different domains (social linguistic areas of use) also plays a role here,⁴ which Brendler does not address.

In the following section, “Name and Name Variants from a Nomematic Perspective” (144–147), Brendler again distances himself from the Kohlheimian approach by refusing to accept the allonyms /Friederich/, /Friedrich/, /Friedreich/, /Fridel/, /Fritz/ found in Kohlheim (1977) as such; instead, he regards /Fridel/ and /Fritz/ as independent nomems, since they do not fall within the “tolerance range” of grammatical identity (146). The term “tolerance range” is, of course, a very problematic one, as Van Langendonck (2010: 206) also observes. Who determines how far tolerance may extend in each case? For the people of fourteenth-century Regensburg, Friedrich and Fridel were interchangeable, that is, functionally equivalent, and thus corresponded to Kohlheim’s definition of allonyms of one nomem /fridu-rīh/.⁵ Nor does the objection that the notation of this (and other) nomems in Old High German form represent the linguistic consciousness of late medieval name users, and should therefore be rejected, hold water: as explained at the beginning of this article, this notation is merely a convention and was in no way intended to reflect the onymic competence of medieval Regensburgers.⁶ Under the heading “Consequences of Nomematics for Name Research” (147–164), Brendler calls, among other things, for a fundamentally different approach to the formulation of

⁴ Siehe hierzu Kohlheim (2001: 151f.).

⁵ The problem with the concept of a “tolerance limit” becomes clear precisely in the name equation Bertl Menhart = Partl Menhart cited by Brendler, which he considers an example of a “name-identical name equation” (see above). The equation came from an Austrian land register of 1457 (see R. Kohlheim 2006: 53). In another context and at another time, one would hardly regard Bertl and Partl as realizations of one nomem; rather, one would associate them with Berthold and Bartholomäus. What is tolerable as “identical” always depends on the time and group in question.

⁶ Brendler had also acknowledged this elsewhere (e.g., p. 57). See Kohlheim (2001: 148).

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name statistics and name books (dictionaries). He considers the latter in particular to be “still almost entirely unversed in identity theory” (151). Yet it must surely be clear to every author of personal-name dictionaries that their entries are not full-fledged names referring to just one person each, but rather, as with any dictionary author, lemmas (in Brendler’s terminology, archinoms).⁷ The usual way of speaking (“The first name Sophia has been given in the German-speaking world for centuries”) will therefore presumably remain acceptable, despite the form rigorously demanded by Brendler (“The first names Sophia have been given in the German-speaking world for centuries”) (150).

Recent neurological and cognitivist findings are invoked to provide further support for nomematic theory from this perspective as well (164–169). This approach deserves the highest recognition, since onomastics still has pioneering work to do in this regard.⁸ However, the reviewer considers the distinction between semantic and episodic (also: biographical) memory—discovered by Endel Tulving as early as 1972 and developed further ever since, and now probably generally accepted—to provide even stronger cognitivist confirmation of nomematics than the literature cited by Brendler.⁹ Semantic memory stores general knowledge beyond the individual, which also includes the mental lexicon, while episodic memory stores autobiographical experiences and events (Rickheit, Weiss, Eikmeyer 2010: 36). It is entirely plausible, then, that archinoms are stored in semantic memory, while episodic (biographical) memory contains the information acquired over the course of the individual biography of each name user concerning specific name bearers, thereby enabling the corresponding reference.¹⁰

The following Chapters 3–7 apply nomematics to several name types for purposes of illustration. The subjects covered are settlement names (171–198), field names (199–226), water names (227–254), plant names (255–281), and personal names (283–311). These chapters are all organized according to the same scheme—

⁷ Vgl. auch Van Langendonck (2010: 196): „However, when, for instance, Goossens [...] speaks about the distribution of the name Müller in Germany [...], I am sure he knows what he is talking about: the name form (or in my view, better: ‘proprial lemma’ [...]) Müller [...]”

⁸ Siehe jedoch Van Langendonck (2007: 106–116).

⁹ Siehe z. B. Tulving (2002), Rickheit, Weiss, Eikmeyer (2010: 36–37).

¹⁰ Brendler does not refer explicitly to Tulving, but briefly mentions, citing another source, “exemplar storage” versus “episodic storage” (p. 169), two terms that were presumably inspired by Tulving.

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constructed. Chapter 3 may serve as an example: 1) “Settlement-name identity as a problem” (171–172), 2) “Nomematics as a solution to the problem” (172), 3) “Settlement names as nomematic units” (173–185), 4) “Settlement-name identity/identities as a relationship/relationships between nomematic units” (185–198). Brendler identifies identity-theoretical shortcomings of varying degrees in all the branches of name research that he discusses. He considers them most pronounced in personal-name research. In these chapters, his concern is to avoid confusing name identity with name equality “or also etymological or functional identity” (171) of names. In all these chapters, the application of nomematics is illustrated through detailed formalizations (e.g. 175–185), and they all conclude with the observation that name history is a history of identity (e.g. 198). Before the extensive documentation and index section, already mentioned at the outset, there follow a “Summary” (313–318) and a brief “Outlook” (319), which states, among other things: “Finally, the presentation of naming systems on the basis of nomematics (= Nomematik as system theory) remains an urgent task for the future” (319). The reviewer, who believes he has already completed considerable preliminary work on this (cf. Kohlheim 1997; 1998), can fully endorse this.

In conclusion, it remains to be said that, by further developing and refining Kohlheim’s nomematic method, Brendler has undoubtedly presented a sophisticated terminological toolkit for identifying onymic identities and, above all, has first raised awareness of the problem posed by the concept of “identity” in the field of name research. Weak points, for example the still inadequately defined concept of the “tolerance range,” require further work; moreover, the reviewer feels that the intended “panchronic” account of diachronic onymic change seems more asserted than achieved. The future will show which version of the nomematic approach—the one presented by Kohlheim since 1977 or Brendler’s—will prove significant for practical name research.

REFERENCES

Brendler Silvio 2008: Nomematik. Identitätstheoretische Grundlagen der Namenforschung (insbesondere der Namengeschichte, Namenlexikographie, Namengeographie, Namenstatistik und Namenstheorie). Hamburg: Baar.

Coseriu Eugenio 1967: El plural en los nombres propios. – Teoría del lenguaje y lingüística general. Cinco estudios. Segunda edición. Madrid: Gredos.

Freudenberg Rudolf 1966: Das Phonem und seine Struktur. – Zeitschrift für Mundartforschung 33, 1–13.

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Freudenberg Rudolf 1967/68: Unpublished paper for the “Name Research” group of the advanced linguistics seminar in the winter semester 1967/68 at the Philipps University of Marburg/Lahn.

Harris Zellig S. 1969: Structural Linguistics. 8^th impression. – Chicago, London: The University of Chicago Press.

Kohlheim Rosa 2006: Zur ländlichen Rufnamen gebung in Niederösterreich im 15. Jahrhundert (nach dem Urbar des Zisterzienserklosters Zwettl von 1457). Beiträge zur Namenforschung: Neue Folge 41, 49–69. Wieder abgedruckt in Kohlheim Rosa, Kohlheim Volker 2011: Personennamen. Motivation – Diffusion – Integration. Hamburg: Baar, 91–111.

Kohlheim Volker 1977: Regensburger Rufnamen des 13. und 14. Jahrhunderts: Linguistische und sozio-onomastische Untersuchungen zu Struktur und Motivik spätmittelalterlicher Anthroponymie. Wiesbaden: Steiner.

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Įžvalgos / Insights

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Received August 25, 2013.

VOLKER KOHLHEIM

Schlosshof Birken 11, D-95447 Bayreuth, Deutschland

[email protected]

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