20220807 - Philosophiblahblahblah - Linguistics - Anglo-Saxon Onomastics & Properties of Identity

Reading this…

Colman, Fran; The Grammar of Names in Anglo-Saxon England (2014)

…a linguistics heavy tome far more about the importance of onomastics as a field of science rather than Anglo-Saxon era per se. The following is a train of thought muddle.

So far I’m persuaded to the conclusion that names are *not* nouns, but a different and semantically rich class of determinative. Right then.

But the argument to get there I strongly demure on many points representative of unexamined assumptions inherent in Western thought. The point of debate irks me most being the characteristic of names as individual and arbitrary (following Saussure, insert gag on ‘continental philosophers’ here). The famous example of “mama” as universal and non-arbitrary is all one needs to problematize the Saussurian axiom.

This argument hinges on perspectives of person and spirit bound by the Hellenistic materialism to which the West is heir. Literally anyone with an animistic viewpoint inherently contradicts these assumptions, especially with regard to the transmigratory spiritual poetics of names. Alice is only one Alice because she is named in a referential heavy materialistic culture, whereas Bob is all Bobs by virtue of his ontological dimension of naming in a culture where Bobs reincarnate by their name. That is, a name in those many cultural matrices which by communal articulation of person rather than isolate individual presuppose transmigratory unity of person through names, not to mention the personality of non-human and place; this reifies a far more amorphous and ‘uncountable’ eigenstate for names as lexa.

This all has direct bearing on the politics of identity, a taxon which is inherently dependent on the hegemonies of Western modernity in ways corrosive of communal cultures. Semantics delineates practical hermeneutics. An onomastics of identity is patently ideological to that hegemonic end, as it must needs elide nebulous and non-definite qualities of determinatives (whether noun or name) in cultures which articulate personality (“identity”) through matrices of relation rather than individual differentiation.

“Sun” is rather a perfect example of the problem, given that it is indeed a name in animistic conception; the lexeme “Sun” is articulated as particular in a way apart from the Platonic predicates of identity. As such, in animistic context, names do indeed allow for representative subtypes. (The eigenstate of “Sun” in Teutonic conception is indeed proper name, hence the reinscription of “Sun” as noun by Christianization carried ideological weight. If it were otherwise, this propagandistic move could not have occurred. And yet “Sun” is reiterative when articulated in a transmigratory, plural sense common to northern Eurasian animistic cultures. Both conditions are true. Hence “the Sun to-day” is an example of name as a recurrent representation.)

All this gets dicier still when one applies name taboos. If onomastics is central to language, because anthropocentrism, then it follows that the ontological dimension is also more than mere “sense” of names. And as example of this we find name taboos as near universal, especially in animistic societies. If a name is *not* meant to be used, but hidden, disused, then its primary purpose is much more than referential; a hidden name is ontological in the Tillichian mode, a node of paramount spiritual relation. Hence names must be more than anthropocentric semiotics, and thus argue for language as including such faculty as a baseline. No name in such a constellation of meaning can be arbitrary. Even the phonemic information (by whatever conditions) of a hidden name must yield to primordial, ontic purposes for personality outwith mere referential identity, or else the cryptological （隱語） dimension would not be functional in such societies. Name taboos presuppose *singularity of sign and signifier*, phoneme and morpheme, at least deep relation in the ontological dimension to which the denotations and connotations of such names ultimately refer. Materialists may see the ontological dimension as notional to the language, but cannot elide the intrinsic and vital necessity of it within such a culture’s onomastics in ways which problematize both referential and Saussurian views.

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