Analytical Tools for Toponymy: Their Application to Scottish Hydronymy
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Date
2008Author
King, Jacob
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Abstract
It has long been observed that there is a correlation between the physical qualities of a watercourse and
the linguistic qualities of its name; for instance, of two river-names, one having the linguistic quality
of river as its generic element, and one having burn, one would expect the river to be the longer of the
two. Until now, a phenomenon such as this had never been formally quantified. The primary focus
of this thesis is to create, within a Scottish context, a methodology for elucidating the relationship
between various qualities of hydronyms and the qualities of the watercourses they represent. The area
of study includes every catchment area which falls into the sea from the River Forth, round the east
coast of Scotland, up to and including the Spey; also included is the east side of the River Leven /
Loch Lomond catchment area. The linguistic strata investigated are: Early Celtic, P-Celtic, Gaelic and
Scots.
In the first half of the introduction scholarly approaches to toponymy are discussed, in a Scottish
and hydronymic context, from the inception of toponymy as a discipline up to the present day; the
capabilities and limitations of these approaches are taken into consideration. In the second half the
approaches taken in this thesis are outlined. The second chapter explains and justifies in more detail
the methodology and calculus used in this thesis. The subsequent chapters examine the following
linguistic components of a hydronym: generic elements, linguistic strata, semantics and phonological
overlay. In each of these chapters the methodology is harnessed as an analytical tool to generate new
findings for hydronymic research. The conclusion consists of a summary of the findings and a review
of the performance of the calculus.
It emerges that these analytical tools are of use to the field of toponymy in two ways. Firstly, they
formalise and challenge previously unquantified statements made in the field of toponymy. Secondly,
they elucidate hitherto unnoticed phenomena. It is suggested that in the future this methodology be
applied to other datasets (particularly hill-names) and to other regions in Scotland and the world at
large.