Richard Coates
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3175-4775 
University of the West of England, Bristol, United Kingdom

https://doi.org/10.4467/K7478.47/22.23.17725

Abstract
Much work in onomastics tends to be language- or ethnicity-related and subdisciplinarian. In the Western tradition, the creation of a general onomastics, an overarching theory of names and naming, has largely been the province of philosophy, especially logic, with some sporadic additions from linguistics. Attempts to predicate such a theory on data from a world-wide range of languages have been conspicuously rare. Mostly, general work on names has been expressed in language-neutral terms, but within the framework of the dominant language of academic discourse; formerly Latin, and more recently often English. The elephant in the room of onomastic theory cannot be dealt with in this way. Humankind is split in its view of the relation between names and their individual (especially human) bearers. Are they more or less arbitrary labels, as the Western tradition broadly agrees (with some discomfort about what “more or less” might entail), or are they integral attributes of their bearers, like the mind or the soul, as other cultures insist? The point of this contribution is to frame the question in the light of current theoretical work, and to explore in what sense, if any, and in what way, it might be “answered” rather than dismissed.

Keywords
name theory, personal name, name and bearer, label, attribute, mysticism