Names are folk poetic design of the country. They speak about the character of the people, their history, their inclinations and peculiarities of life. (Konstantin Paustovsky)
Throughout our life, from the moment of birth to the very death, various geographical names accompany us. We live on the Eurasian continent, in Russia, in a certain region or region, in a city, town, village and village, and each of the listed objects has its own name.
Thus, a toponym is the name of continents and oceans, countries and geographical areas, cities and streets in them, rivers and lakes, natural objects and gardens. The origin and semantic content, historical roots and changes in the pronunciation and spelling of the names of geographical objects over the centuries are studied by a special science - toponymy.
What is toponymy
The word "toponymy" comes from two Greek words:topos is a place and onima is a name. This scientific discipline is a branch of onomastics - a branch of linguistics that studies proper names. Toponymy is an integral science functioning at the intersection of linguistics, geography and history.
Geographical names do not appear in an "empty" place: noticing certain features of the relief and nature, people who lived nearby called them, emphasizing their characteristic features. Over time, the peoples who lived in a particular region changed, but the names were preserved and used by those who replaced them. The basic unit for the study of toponymy is the toponym. The names of cities and rivers, villages and villages, lakes and forests, fields and streams - all these are toponyms of Russia, very diverse both in time of appearance and in their cultural and linguistic roots.
What is a toponym
In literal translation from Greek, a toponym is a “name of a place”, that is, the name of a particular geographical object: a continent, a mainland, a mountain and an ocean, a sea and a country, a city and a street, natural objects. Their main purpose is to fix the "binding" of a particular place on the surface of the Earth. In addition, toponyms for historical science are not just the name of any geographical object, but a historical trace on the map, which has its own history of occurrence, linguistic origin and semantic meaning.
By what criteria toponyms are classified
A single classification of toponyms that would suit both linguists and geographers and historians does not exist today. Toponyms are classified according to a variety of criteria, but most often according to the following:
- by type of designated geographical objects (hydronyms, oronyms, dromonims and others);
- linguistic (Russian, Manchu, Czech, Tatar and other names);
- historical (Chinese, Slavic and others);
-
by structure:
- simple;
- derivatives;
- complex;- compound;
- by area.
Classification by area of territory
The most interesting is the classification of toponyms according to their territorial basis, when geographical objects, depending on their size, are classified as macrotoponyms or microtoponyms.
Microtoponyms are the individual names of small geographical objects, as well as characteristic features of the relief and landscape. They are formed on the basis of the language or dialect of the people or nationality living nearby. Microtoponyms are very mobile and changeable, but, as a rule, they are limited territorially by the distribution zone of one or another dialect, dialect or language.
Macrotoponyms are, first of all, the names of large natural or natural and socio-administrative units created as a result of human activity. The main characteristics of this group are standardization and sustainability, as well as the breadth of use.
Types of place names
The following types of toponyms are distinguished in modern toponymy:
| Types of toponyms | Geographical names of objects | Examples |
| Astyonyms | cities | Astana, Paris, Stary Oskol |
| Oikonyms | settlements and settlements | the village of Kumylzhenskaya, the village of Finev Lug, the village of Shpakovskoe |
| Urbonyms | various intracity facilities: theaters and museums, gardens and squares, parks and embankments and others | Tver city garden, Luzhniki stadium, Razdolie residential complex |
| Godonyms | streets | Volkhonka, Revolution Guard Street |
| Agoronyms | squares | Palace and Troitskaya in St. Petersburg, Manezhnaya in Moscow |
| Geonyms | avenues and driveways | Prospect of Heroes, 1st passage of the First Horse Lakhta |
| Dromonyms | traffic highways and roads of various types, as a rule, passing outside settlements | Northern Railway, BAM |
| Burinames | any territories, regions, districts | Moldavian, Strigino |
| Pelagonyms | seas | White, Dead, B altic |
| Limnonyms | lakes | Baikal, Karas'yar, Onega, Trostenskoe |
| Potamonyms | rivers | Volga, Nile, Ganges, Kama |
| Gelonyms | bogs | Vasyuganskoye, Sinyavinskoye, Sestroretskoye |
| Oronyms | hills, ridges, hills | Pyrenees and Alps, Borovitskyhill, Studenaya Gora and Dyatlovy Mountains |
| anthropotoponyms | derived from a surname or personal name | Strait of Magellan, the city of Yaroslavl, many villages and villages with the name Ivanovka |
How toponyms decline
Words-toponyms having Slavic roots and ending in -ev(o), -in(o), -ov(o), -yn(o), were previously considered traditionally inflected. However, in recent decades, more and more often they are used in an indeclinable form, as they were previously used by professional military and geographic scientists.
The declension of toponyms, such as Tsaritsyno, Kemerovo, Sheremetyevo, Murino, Kratovo, Domodedovo, Komarovo, Medvedkovo and the like, was mandatory in the time of Anna Akhmatova, but today both inflected and indeclinable forms are considered equally true and used. The exception is the names of settlements, if they are used as applications with a generic name (village, village, farm, town, city, etc.), then it would be correct not to incline, for example, to the Strigino region, from the Matyushino region, to the city of Pushkino. If there is no such generic name, then both inflected and non-inflected variants can be used: from Matyushino and towards Matyushin, to Knyazevo and from Knyazev.
Indefinable toponyms
In modern Russian, there are several cases in which toponyms ending in -o can only be used in their invariable form:
- Geographical names associated with the names of prominent historicalpersonalities are called memorial. If such a name ends in -o, then it does not decline, for example, in the villages of Repino and Tuchkovo, in the city of Chapaevo.
- In the event that the toponym is a compound word of two or more parts, is written with a hyphen and both parts end in -o, then only the second part changes with declension: in Odintsovo-Vakhrameevo, in Orekhovo-Zuyevo, in Ado-Tymov. If such names are preceded by the words city, village, then the names of such settlements are not declined - the village of Ado-Tymov, Odintsovo-Vakhrameyevo.
- Dictionary of toponyms recommends not inflecting their first part when using complex foreign geographical names, for example, in Buenos Aires, in Alma-Ata. An exception to this case is the first part of the toponym "on the river": in Frankfurt an der Oder, from Stratford an der Avon.
- In the case when the gender of the geographical name and the generic name do not match, for example, in the village of Aduevo, from the village of Chernyaevo, at the Sinevo station. Generic names (village, station, village) are feminine, but geographical names with them retain the form of the middle one.
