THE PHENOMENON OF HOMONYMY IN EPONYMY

Abstract

The article is devoted to the description of the phenomenon of homonymy in eponymy, traced in the lexical material collected from the dictionaries of Ukrainian, English and French languages. Eponyms are interpreted as words or phrases formed from proper names by rethinking the meaning of the creative basis, and homonyms are understood as words that have the same sound or written form, but completely different meanings. Homonymy can be realized at the levels of creative bases and derived eponyms. An illustration of homonymy at the level of creative units are tokens Eng. spencer1 “short jacket”, Eng. spencer2 “wig” and Eng. spencer3 “life-belt”, formed from the names of George Spencer, Charles Spencer and Christopher Miner Spencer, in accordance. Homonymy at the level of derived units is represented by the words Fr. limousine1 “woolen coat worn by shepherds”, Fr. limousine2 “type of car” and Fr. limousine3 “breed of cows”. All tokens are derived from the name of the place Fr. Limousine. There are examples where homonymy can be represented at both levels at the same time (e.g. the token Ukr. бостон1 “twill weave fabric” comes from the name of Boston city in the UK, while Ukr. бостон2 “slow waltz” and Ukr. бостон3 “card game” were formed from the name of Boston city in the United States). Eponyms can be homonyms to words that were not created from proper names. For example, the word Ukr. тор¹comes from Lat. torus “convexity” and means “a geometric body formed by rotating a circle around its axis that lies in the plane of this circle and does not cross it”, and Ukr. тор² means a little-used extrasystemic unit of pressure and comes from the name of Italian scientist E. Torricelli. Eponyms can enter in the relationship of interlingual homonymy, for example, derived words from the name Robert: Eng. robin is used to denote birds, fish and plants of different species, while Fr. robin denotes a fool, a naive man, a ram. The use of homonyms in the creation of eponyms can be consciously used for language play, as Paul Emile Lecoq de Boisbaudran had demonstrated in creating the name for the chemical element gallium.