mythology - the goddess Juno), “July” (The ancient Romans named the second month of summer in
honor of Julius Caesar), “August” (In Latin, this was the name of the sixth month of the year, and
initially this word was used by the ancient Romans to name the first emperor Octavian, who for his
deeds received the title of Augustus, literally - "exalted by the gods") [2]. Eponyms endow those
who created or invented something with the power of the name and the idea that survives them.
They also highlight people who have characterized entire styles, eras or studies, playing the role of
linguistic monuments, forcing interested people to delve into the history and culture of the era that
originated those eponyms. They do not only play the role of a tool of spreading the culture as a soft
power but also remembered as pride and representatives of the certain era for the next generations.
Proper names, despite the already established tradition of their study, remain one of the
problem areas of onomasiological research. In the study of proper names that function as part of
complex names, one aspect become fundamentally important. It can be described as motivational. A
motive or motivation, being part of a cognitive approach to the analysis of linguistic phenomena,
presupposes an explanation of how a particular name appeared in a language, which motivates the
choice of a particular linguistic sign to name a certain subject. This entails consideration of both
extralinguistic factors (cultural, social, psychological and others) and intra-linguistic (semantic
transfers, semantic changes, etc.).
Eponymous terms as part of the language contribute to a deeper understanding of a person and
his culture, which is especially important for linguists. The study of
cultural characteristics by
analyzing linguistic facts is a valuable, practical and theoretical material for expanding the existing
knowledge about the reality around us.
At the end of the 20th century, it turned out that in the science of man there is no place for the
main thing that created man and his intellect - culture. The fact that at this time the Man was placed
in the center of the universe and the center of language contributed to the formation of cultural
linguistics and the transfer of research emphasis to such culturally "charged" objects as international
eponymous terms.
Guillaumin defines culture as "a set of characteristics that are typical of people, groups,
societies (...), which can be recognized by the habits, feelings and the material world of objects,
both utilitarian and aesthetic." As Guillaumin continues, anthropologists extend this definition to
"the set of ways of thinking, institutions, and material objects that define a society." From an
anthropological point of view, culture includes language and way of life, the organization of family
ties and techniques such as tools,
food and clothing, ways of thinking and feeling, taboos and
obligations, courtesy and entertainment, as well as the forms taken by mental illness or marginality,
etc." [3, 161]. Culture is not a closed system, especially in our time, when the administrative and
political boundaries of many countries are becoming more and more blurred every day, thanks to
globalization and the need for teaching foreign languages to build successful international
communication. In turn, intercultural encounters have led, among other things, to exchange of
terminology.
From a modern point of view, linguistics has long ceased to be only a science of language -
language, being woven into all types of human activity and reflecting
the world as a person
speaking in this language sees it, cannot be understood and explained outside of connection with a
person. Philosophical anthropology is the science of the essence and essential structure of man, of
his basic relations: to nature, society, other people, himself, about his origin, about the social and
metaphysical foundations of his existence, about the main categories and laws of his being.
Nowadays, the idea that the nature of language can be understood only on the basis of a person and
his world as a whole is increasingly common.
At present, the main feature of the linguo-cognitive and culturological direction in science is
the shift of emphasis in scientific research from object to object, that is, to human subjectivity,
formed by the work of consciousness, which orients the subject to comprehend the meaning of
cultural phenomena, to its content. Behind such analyzed linguistic units as eponymous terms, there
is primarily a human personality.
Eponyms are cognitive and cultural phenomenon because of the following factors [4, 21]:
1. There are the toponyms as Virginia and America. The word America is named after Italian
Map maker, Amerigo Vespucci. While Virginia was named for Queen Elizabeth I of England, who
was known as the Virgin Queen. The proper name in the structure of the eponym term makes it the
keeper of culture and history, "so that the past continues in the future, so that we are not allowed to
become impoverished with the great riches of the past." They arose long before the appearance of
writing and reflect the formation of ethnic groups, their common and distinctive features, the history
of interaction and mutual influence of peoples in different historical epochs. This kind of linguistic
monuments provide important information about the ethnogenesis of people, their socio-economic,
cultural and political life in different historical periods.
2. Eponyms as cognitive linguistic units include proper names
that are important for a
particular country or even humanity. For example, Aristotelianism, Platonism, Confucianism and
others. “-ism” is a suffix in many English words, originally derived from the Ancient Greek suffix -
ισμός (-ismós), and reaching English through the Latin -ismus, and the French -isme. It means
"taking side with" or "imitation of", they usually came after names of remarkable people with their
wide-spread ideology, making it an eponym, and are contested and historically changeable
concepts, noting that isms are used as names of doctrines and movements. It can be seen as an
attempt to create a perspective for a global intellectual history that combines a long history of ideas
with a transnational and global perspective.
3. Eponyms are special lexemes used in special professional vocabulary. As we discussed
above, frames are a collection of words that can be used in various special fields. Thus, eponyms
are frame words that can be used in areas such as medicine, physics, politics, economics, chemistry,
linguistics, and others: “Daltonism” (Feature
of knowledge, named after John Dalton, who first
described one of the types of color blindness based on his own feelings in 1794), “nicotine”
(Derived from the French, further from own Nicot, named Jean Nicot - the French ambassador to
the Portuguese court, who in 1560 was the first to deliver tobacco to France). Inventors, founders
and scientists are often people of the same name, inspiring eponymous terms that are used to
describe their inventions, products or discoveries. The reason for this is the goal of perpetuating the
names of the discoverers in the history of a particular sphere.
Thus, the use of eponyms becomes one of the methods for creating special linguistic
neologisms and, consequently, linguistic enrichment. They bring color and in some way trace
scientific traditions and culture to history. The cultural specificity of eponyms is a way of
preserving the cultural heritage of a society.
Since ancient times, people have been revered or
despised for their actions, and their names have been used as an emblem or symbol of a particular
event, behavior, object, etc.
The structure of a language determines the way native speakers of the language in question
see the world, or, in a slightly weaker version, is that structure does not define the worldview, but is
still extremely influential. In the predisposition of native speakers to adopt a certain worldview, and
when there is no linguistic sign for that particular worldview, the process becomes more
complicated as it borrows both the worldview and the words to express it. To concretize, viewed
from either an everyday or scientific point of view, eponyms are a class of "words that express a
worldview."
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