Estudo toponímico no Território de Identidade 19 - Portal do Sertão da Bahia

Abstract

Toponymy is a branch of onomastics which studies proper names of places and geographical accidents in order to find semantic reasons for designations. Thus, from toponomastics studies, historical and sociocultural facts about a people can be revealed as well as its path from the territory settlement process to the current moment since the study of the lexicon is, in general, an important source of knowledge regarding the modus vivendi of a people. From this linguistic sample, recognizing and understanding a social group, its expectations, feats etc. is made possible. Therefore, this dissertation aims to describe and analyze the toponymic lexicon of municipalities concerning identity territory 19 - Portal do Sertão da Bahia in terms of: (i) linguistic origin; (ii) composition of morphological structure and (iii) semantic motivation of the place name. The study corpus comprises 988 physical and human features toponyms concerning this territory which is made up of 17 cities. The corpus constitution was based on synchronic data which have been collected from descriptive municipal maps elaborated by Diretoria de Informações Geoambientais da Superintendência de Estudos Econômicos e Sociais da Bahia - SEI, which had as base sources the transportation system – DERBA (2007), the list of places - IBGE (2010) and the political-administrative division of Bahia state – SEI (2015).The maps have 1.100.000 scale with a well-defined urban sprawl and they are composed of physical accidents (rivers, stream, mountain ranges etc.) and human accidents (cities, towns, farms, villages etc.). The research was oriented according to the lexicon discussions by Biderman (1999), Vilela (1995) and toponymy, using the theoretical and methodological model postulated by Dauzart (1926), which has been reshaped, discussed and expanded by Dick (1990, 1992, 2001, 2007) and considering the most recent contributions of authors who study Brazilian toponymic, such as Isquerdo (1996, 2020a, 2020b), Carvalhinhos (2002-2003), Carvalho (2010), among others. After description and analysis of 988 places names, the results indicate that the studied identity territory is made up of 495 toponymic occurrences of physical nature (50%) and 485 toponyms of anthropocultural nature (49%) and 8 toponyms which have not been classified under the taxonomic perspective adopted. The most productive of physical nature toponyms are phytotoponyms, that is, places names have a strong influence of Brazilian flora. On the other hand, toponyms of anthropocultural nature had the euphoric animotopônimos with the highest level of occurrences in the analyzed data. These results confirm a tendency in Brazilian toponymy, which has already been presented in other studies, a strong influence of flora elements and physical referentials on the naming process. Furthermore, the use of object names is very striking, strongly presenting the elements that are part of their culture. From the perspective of toponyms formation prevailed names made up of simple structure, followed by compound structure toponyms. With respect to the language origin, there is a noticeable predominance of Portuguese language toponyms, followed by indigenous language and, presenting lower incidence, names of African origin appear, confirming data from other studies which pointed to the erasing process of Indigenous languages and African languages when it comes to the naming process. At last, in the Appendixes A section, lexicographical-toponymic fiches, elaborated and expanded from the model created by Dick (2004), are presented in order to make data available in a systematized way. In summary, the results concerning the investigated toponymic sample conform to studies done to describe toponyms. Besides, the existing toponymy in the identity territory 19 reaffirmed the close relation among the items of the triad lexicon, culture and society so that to present the consolidation of cultural heritage, territory formation and influences of social history of Portal do Sertão da Bahia which are materialized and immortalized by the toponymic lexicon.