On Some Problems of the Ideographic Description of Place Names

The article deals with some problems of lexicographic treatment of place names. As a model of lexicographic description, the author chooses the ideographic principle which has been extensively used in appellative dictionaries but remains mostly unknown to onomastic lexicography. The author develops the concept of ideogram as applied to proper names, specifically place names. The author proposes to use the term “topoideogram” to denote the conceptual meaning of the appellative base of a place name regardless of the nature of its derivational relations. In order to illustrate the appliation of these theoretical suggestions, the author models the structure of an ideographic dictionary of microtoponyms of the Western part of Vologda Region in Russia (Babayevsky, Vytegorsky, Belozersky and Vashkinsky districts) based on the materials of the Toponymic Expeditions of Ural Federal University. The principles of such lexicographic treatment are illustrated with reference to two ideographic types of place names: ‘Birds’ and ‘Musical Instruments’. The author argues that ideographic treatment of toponyms provides important onomasiological and ethnolinguistic information on the corpus of topoideograms of a specific region and their current use. The author also discusses the problem of the ideographic description of the so-called situational toponyms based on script patterns translated in motivational contexts.