hellog〜英語史ブログ / 2023-04-03

■ #5089. eponym [eponym][personal_name][onomastics][etymology][metonymy][semantic_change][word_formation][lexicology]

　eponym とは人名に基づいて造られた語のことである．英語の具体例については「#2842. 固有名詞から生まれた語」 ([2017-02-06-1])，「#2849. macadamia nut」 ([2017-02-13-1])，「#3460. 紅茶ブランド Earl Grey」 ([2018-10-17-1])，「#3461. 警官 bobby」 ([2018-10-18-1]) で挙げてきた．また，eponym は「#5079. 商標 (trademark) の言語学的な扱いは難しい」 ([2023-03-24-1]) とも関係の深い話題である．McArthur の英語学用語辞典によれば，次の通り．

EPONYM [19c: from Greek epṓonumos named on]. (1) A personal name from which a word has been derived: John B. Stetson, the 19c US hatter after whom the stetson hat was named. (2) The person whose name is so used: The Roman emperor Constantine, who gave his name to Constantinople. (3) The word so derived: stetson, Constantinople. The process of eponymy results in many forms: (1) Such simple eponyms as atlas, which became popular after the 16c Flemish cartographer Gerardus Mercator put the figure of the titan Atlas on the cover of a book of maps. (2) Compounds and attributive constructions such as loganberry after the 19c US lawyer James H. Logan, and Turing machine after the 20c British mathematician Alan Turing. (3) Possessives such as Parkinson's Law after the 20c British economist C. Northcote Parkinson, and the Islets of Langerhans after the 19c German pathologist Paul Langerhans. (4) Derivatives such as Bowdlerize and gardenia, after the 18c English expurgator of Shakespeare, Thomas Bowdler, and the 19c Scottish-American physician Alexander Garden. (5) Clippings, such as dunce from the middle name and the first element of the last name of the learned 13c Scottish friar and theologian John Duns Scotus, whose rivals called him a fool. (6) Blends such as gerrymander, after the US politician Elbridge Gerry (b. 1744), whose redrawn map of the voting districts of Massachusetts in 1812 was said to look like a salamander, and was then declared a gerrymander. The word became a verb soon after. Works on eponymy include: Rosie Boycott's Batty, Bloomers and Boycott: A Little Etymology of Eponymous Words (Hutchinson, 1982) and Cyril L. Beeching's A Dictionary of Eponyms (Oxford University Press, 1988).

　ここで eponym は語源的に（一部であれ）人名に基づいている語，etymon が人名であるような語として，あくまで語源的な観点から定義されていることに注意したい．つまり後にさらに別の語形成を経たり，意味変化を経たりした語も含まれ，今となっては形態や意味においてオリジナルの人（名）からは想像できないほど遠く離れてしまっているケースもあるということだ．語源的に定義づけられているという特殊性を除けば，eponym はその他の一般の語とさほど変わらない振る舞いをしているといえるのではないか．

　・ McArthur, Tom, ed. The Oxford Companion to the English Language. Oxford: OUP, 1992.

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