Through time and across languages personal name spellings derive from other name spellings. This is an important source of variation in the personal name between different records and at different times. This study covers 22 primitive ways to derive a particular spelling of a name from some other spelling of the name. An important consequence of making each type of variant elementary is to confine its description and effects to one of five particular areas of grammar, which is ideally designed for a description of language that is scientific. These areas are the following:
| 1) orthography or correctness in spelling; | ||
| 2) phonology, which is the study of linguist sounds; | ||
| 3) morphology, which is concerned with the parts of the names that carry their own meaning; | ||
| 4) syntax, the arrangement of categories of name pieces into patterns that structure name phrases; | ||
| 5) language, the cultural context in which names arise. |
In a sense each of these areas of grammar are orthogonal, i.e., they each measure a different dimension of linguistic reality. Figure 2 tries to capture this idea of finding othogonal measures. Only three dimensions can be easily diagrammed on a plane surface, but presumably the other dimensions listed could be made orthogonal. Problems arise when the dimensions are measuring the same aspect of reality. For example, in a language whose spelling conventions reflect the pronunciation of the words in a one-to-one manner, a change in one value has a corresponding change in the other. In other words, when different languages and media of transmission are considered, the mapping between dimensions may be nearly or hardly orthogonal.
The different colors are meant to convey this analytical distinction. In the following list of the various primitive derivation types, there is a letter by each one to indicate the most prominent aspect of the grammar that accounts for it.
The most important and most easily tractable kinds of derivation are from another version of the same name. Each name group has a standard version and a whole raft of variant spellings. There are seven kinds of derivation that belong to the class of associations internal to a name group. These derivations result in variants by one or more of the following:
| 1) mistyping or typographical error (O), | ||
| 2) misreading or graphological error (O), | ||
| 3) transliteration (O), | ||
| 4) abbreviation (O), | ||
| 5) inflectional form (M), | ||
| 6) hypocorism (M, S), and | ||
| 7) respelling, dialect, or phonological variation (P). |
Experience with names has disclosed two situations where a name consists of multiple words. Processes of hypocorism on this kind of name do not form a morphological variation but a syntactic one.
Figure 3 illustrates the way in which variation normally relies on various standard forms of a name. These dimensions are dendritic; they are arranged like the branches of a tree. Such dimensions may be parallel and only coincidentally orthogonal. The respelling of names caused by accents in its utterance is the most basic change. Then people may make a hypocorism and/or an inflectional form out of a name or its respelling. On top of this the name may be abbreviated and/or transliterated. Any of these variations can be misread or mistyped which processes bring about two additional varieties at the very end of the chain of changes. It seems that changes beyond these would make the name unrecognizable.
An important origin of new names is another language. When names are borrowed from another language a new name comes into being and any external associations disolve in the new culture. For example, the fact that "Margaret" meant pearl in Greek, was eventually lost on the users of the name in English. There are three elementary kinds of borrowing:
| 8) borrowing (L), where the languages exist at the same time, | ||
| 9) evolution (L), where the language changed through time, and | ||
| 10) revival (L), where there is a historical gap between the time the form existed in the original language and when it appeared in the new derivative language. |
The fourth element normally present in the transition between languages was mentioned above as (3) transliteration. This kind of variation is associated with borrowing between languages that use different writing systems. The actual spelling and (7) pronunciation is preserved as much as possible in the transformation however distinct the writing and phonological systems of the two languages may be.
Internal to a culture but associated with the conscious intent of creating a new name are the derivations that involve clear cases of adaptation. Because these derivations are usually from forms of other kinds of names they are considered cases of change in syntactic category:
| 11) gender change (S), usually with given names, | ||
| 12) role change (S), where a surname is used for a given name or vice versa, | ||
| 13) vocabulary item (S), where the name comes from a word normally used to refer to some other kind of object, | ||
| 14) full name (S), where the given name comes from a full name, | ||
| 15) clan names (S), | ||
| 16) occupation names (S), | ||
| 17) descriptive names (S), | ||
| 18) domain names (S), and | ||
| 19) titles (S). |
In these last five kinds of adaptation the names come to be borne by individuals (as surnames), but were originally connected to names in other authorities. In the rest of the adaptations the new spelling comes from one or more already existing names. There are many other innovations that have been used to create new names. Among these are at least the following ten derivational types
| 20) determinative elaboration (S), | ||
| 21) determinative reduction (S), | ||
| 22) morphological elaboration (M), | ||
| 23) morphological reduction (M), | ||
| 24) combining (M), | ||
| 25) blending (M), | ||
| 26) initial-speak (O), | ||
| 27) acronymic abbreviation (O), | ||
| 28) cryptonymic inversion (O), | ||
| 29) cryptonymic infixation (O). |
