The Restructuring of Christian Personal Names in the Pre-National Period: Names Ending in *-ŏ (-ъ, -о)

Abstract

The article continues a series of publications analyzing the derivation within a regional system of Christian personal name forms in the pre-national period. With reference to the anthroponyms recorded in 16–17th centuries Tver business documents, the author focuses on the ways of structural changes of the full forms of male Christian personal names in everyday communication. The second article of the series deals with one paradigmatic class of full Christian personal names, specifically those ending in -ъ, -o. In real communication, the stock of full popular forms of names was not homogeneous, being represented by numerous different phonetic and morphological variants due to rebracketing and formal changes of the anthroponymic stems. The author reveals word-formational mechanisms which enabled foreign personal names to integrate into the onomastic system of the Russian language and resulted in numerous colloquial forms of names with formally modified (truncated, lengthened or rearranged) pseudomorphemes to emerge. The structural rearrangements and formally determined associative correlations in the anthroponymic word-formation sometimes eliminated differences between full and “qualitative” forms because both of them could include the same elements. The structural rearrangements of names were accompanied by phonetic changes. These varieties, both morphological and phonetic, created a unique anthroponymic “pattern” of the region.

Keywords

• Russian language
• regional historical anthroponymy
• Christian personal names
• paradigmatic class
• full form of a personal name
• canonical name
• qualitative
• formant
• pseudo-morpheme