ВОПРОСЫ ОНОМАСТИКИ | PROBLEMS OF ONOMASTICS

Marcos Medrano Duque
University of Salamanca, Salamanca, Spain

*KERH₂- AND *KER- ROOTS IN ANCIENT CELTIC ONOMASTICS AGAINST THE INDO-EUROPEAN BACKGROUND

For citation
Medrano Duque, M. (2025). *Kerh₂- and *ker- Roots in Ancient Celtic Onomastics Against the Indo-European Background. Voprosy onomastiki, 22(2), 94–121. https://doi.org/10.15826/vopr_onom.2025.22.2.018

Received on 22 March 2024
Accepted on 30 September 2024

Abstract: It is well known that the root *ker- ‘upper (body) part, horn’ and its secondary variant *kerh₂- ‘head’ have enjoyed high productivity in all Indo-European languages, at least in the field of common names which was thoroughly surveyed in the past century by A. J. Nussbaum. However, these roots also left a large number of proper names in most western and southern daughter languages of PIE that on many occasions have not been satisfactorily identified or analysed to date. Such names have mainly been transmitted by the Roman epigraphic tradition, although some others can be found in Roman and Greek literary sources, so their phonetic structure may have been altered during the process of transmission. Therefore, the aim of this paper is to compile a comprehensive list of the onomastic traces of *kerh₂- and *ker- roots in ancient and medieval Celtic languages and, where possible, in the rest of the Indo-European languages, paying special attention to the derivational and compositional processes, morphological structures, and dialectal trends deducible from the distribution and frequency of occurrence of proper names. Each proper name or group of proper names has been individually parsed and further cognates outside Celtic branch have been sought in order to seek common formational isoglosses. Last, other unresolved semantic and lexical issues concerning Celtic and Indo-European common derivatives of *ker- mainly found in the field of dendronymy (Greek κράνον/κράνεια ‘cornelian cherry’ and κέρασος ‘bird cherry’, Gaulish κόρνα, and Latin cornum/cornus ‘cornelian cherry’, etc.) will also be addressed at the end of the paper.

Keywords: anthroponymy; toponymy; theonymy; Indo-European; Celtic languages; etymology; morphology; derivation; Indo-European word formation

Acknowledgements

This work has been financed by the University of Salamanca in the framework of its Programa III. I would like to thank Professor Blanca María Prósper (University of Salamanca) for her permanent help, Shoni Lavie-Driver (University of Cambridge) for his useful comments on the formal aspects, and also the two anonymous reviewers of this article for their kind suggestions.

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