Nombres propios del caballo "Pura Raza Española Yeguada Militar" 1889 - 2011 - Estudio onomástico

Abstract

This thesis is an onomastic study of horse names of the Spanish race Pura Raza Española. The material investigated consists of 339 horse names from three selected periods of time between the years 1889 – 2011. The objective is to analyze the meaning of the names, examine the diachronic development of the names of the horses raised by a Spanish stud farm, contrast these names with the names of horses shown at exhibitions in Sweden and finally to investigate semantic values to find out whether the prestige of the race is reflected in the names. Different kinds of dictionaries have been consulted to find the significance of the names. The diachronic and contrastive investigations have been performed by comparing semantic name categories. In order to analyze the prestige of the race a theory suggesting intuitive interpreta-tion has been used. A statistical method has been applied in order to get a sample of the cor-pus to limit the size of the material. The diachronic study shows that that names related to Andalusia and a modest life is common in the period 1889 – 1909, that there is a clear influence of the Spanish Civil War during the years 1930 – 50. No signs of modern life are revealed during 1991 – 2011. The Spanish mate-rial contains more names with a negative value and a modest life. The Swedish material con-tains a higher degree of prestigious names also close to, what seems to be, a Swedish tradition of naming horses. The semantic study reveals that 34 per cent of the total name population can be considered to reflect the culture and the prestige of the race.