Street Names of Shanghai and Ekaterinburg: A Comparative Study

Abstract

The paper presents the findings of a comparative study of street names (hodonyms) in Shanghai and Ekaterinburg in terms of their motivation and historical background. It gives a picture of the main milestones in the history of Shanghai to reveal the general principles of assigning street names: the ancient period associates with natural naming, a particular style of names that modern native speakers regard as classical or “ancient”; the Сoncession Period was marked by a strong European influence in the naming of linear objects; the period after the Xinhai revolution and the period after the formation of the Republic of China are notable by the use of ideological concepts that underlie the naming of city facilities. Based on the semantic classification of hodonyms developed by Yulia A. Kachalkova, the authors distinguish three main groups of street names (memorial, descriptive, and conditionally symbolic), describing features of a specific cultural background behind the formally similar types of names. For instance, the names of mountains inherent in street names in the Chinese culture, besides referring to physical objects, are also symbolic. This brings the authors to identify the street naming patterns that are unique for Russian and Chinese tradition. The hodonymy of Shanghai is peculiar for its appeal to culturally significant texts, the use of fundamental concepts written down in the “old style,” images of mythological animals, whereas in Ekaterinburg a street name typically refers to everyday life and technology. Some examples of structural and semantic differences in the formation of street names are given (namely, the use of syntactically incoherent ideological references in street names of Shanghai at a certain historical stage). It is suggested that some practices of street naming in Shanghai, namely the correlation between the street location and the geographical location of the object it was named by, could be adopted into Russian context.

Keywords

• onomastics
• urbanonymy
• hodonymy
• street names
• urban names
• semantics
• naming pattern
• shanghai
• ekaterinburg