Internal to a culture but tending to create a new name are ten derivations where one particular spelling can be traced from one or more distinct names. The discussion relating to hypocorisms covered some of these devices for creating names. The reason is that so often it is impossible to determine whether the name was created as a variant of an already existing name — meant simply as a pet form — or as an innovation to create a completely new name. There are a number of alterations to names that seem to be made on the basis of folk etymologies. People become acquainted with names in other languages and draw parallels that allow them to feel comfortable with certain elaborations on existing names. Apparently there is a desire to make a short name longer or more elaborate. This makes pet forms particularly susceptible to being elaborated on. English has also taken diminutive forms from other languages with which to innovate. When an elaboration is truly a diminutive, is is probably not advisable to admit it as a new name group upon the basis of the new form. In many cases, however, the resulting form is intended as a distinct name with its own set of variants. When a name is truncated to a single syllable, this syllable may become a name in its own right. At this point the phenomenon might be classed as a morhological reduction. In short the hypocorism is a variant of a name, an elaboration on a spelling usually becomes a new name, and a reduction of a spelling usually does not.
However, when reduction happens to several names, there cannot any longer be any reference to a single fuller name of which it could be a version. Such results may be combined with parts of names or other such results of reduction and these are classed as a combining. The combining of full name forms, or nearly full forms, is the final class of morphological innovation treated here separately as blending.
There are a number of more unusual ways people have found to make up new names using spellings to start with. If someone is given a long name, friends may call him by his initials. The initials when pronounced can then become reinterpreted as a new name and given to a child without reference to the originally cumbersome name. “Initial-speak,” was discussed as a means of abbreviation along with other forms of hypocorism. But there are cases where not only the initials of several names are taken but also those of various vocabulary words and together they combine to form a new name. This is the so-called acronym, an orthographic device for creating names. There are also some very elaborate and more obscure ways of making a name out of phrases or titles. These are what may be called “cryptonymic” in nature, two varieties of which are distinguished here.
There are, then, only five of the above ten new name derivation types that are not cross-classified with other derivations and have not been discussed in previous sections.
