Draft proposals for representation of name components
language: en

Names and nyms

So far we have discussed ways in which a name or referring string encountered in running text may be resolved by considering the object that the name refers to: in the case of a personal name, the name refers to a person; in the case of a place name, to a place, for example. The resolution of this reference is effected by means of the @key attribute available to all elements which are members of the att.naming class, such as <persName> or <placeName> and their more specialized variants such as <foreName> or <country>. However, names can also be regarded as objects in their own right, irrespective of the objects to which they are attached, notably in onomastic studies. From this point of view, the names John in English, Jean in French, and Ivan in Russian might all be regarded as existing independently of any person to which they are attached, and also independently of any variant forms that might be attested in different sources (such as Jon or Johnny in English, or Jehan or Jojo in French). We use the term nym to refer to the canonical or normalized form of a name regarded in such a way, and provide the following elements to encode it:

Any element which is a member of the att.naming class may use the attribute @nymRef to indicate the nym with which it corresponds. Thus, given the following <nym> for the name Antony:

<listNym>
<nym xml:id="N123">
  <form>Antony</form>
</nym>

</listNym>

an occurrence of this name in running text might be encoded as follows: <forename nymRef="#N123">Tony</forename> Blair

The person identified by this particular Tony may be indicated independently using the @key attribute, either on the forename or on the whole name component:

  <forename nymRef="#N123" key="#BLT">Tony</forename>
....
<person xml:id="BLT">
<persName>Tony Blair</persName>
<occupation>politician</occupation>
</person>

The <nym> element may be thought of as providing a specialised kind of dictionary entry. It may contain any of the dictionary component elements from the model.entryPart class, such as <form>, <etym> etc. For example, we may show that the canonical form for a given nym has two orthographic variants in this way:

<nym xml:id="J451">
  <form>
       <orth xml:lang="en-US">Ian</orth>
       <orth xml:lang="en-x-Scots">Iain</orth>
   </form>
</nym>

To provide a more complex etymological decomposition of a name, we may use the existing <etym> element, as follows:

<nym xml:id="XYZ">
<form>Bogomil</form>
<etym>Means <gloss>favoured by God</gloss> from the
<lang>Slavic</lang> elements <mentioned>bog</mentioned>
<gloss>God</gloss> and <mentioned>mil</mentioned>
<gloss>favour</gloss></etym>
</nym>

Where it is necessary to mark the substructure of nyms, this may be done by marking <seg> elements within the <form>:

<nym xml:id="ABC">
<form>
  <choice>
   <seg type="morph"><seg>Bog</seg><seg>o</seg><seg>mil</seg></seg>
   <seg type="morph"><seg>Bogo</seg><seg>mil</seg></seg>
  </choice>
</form>
</nym>

Alternatively, each of the constituents of Bogomil might be marked up as nyms in their own right:

<nym xml:id="B1" type="part">
  <form>bog</form>
</nym>
<nym xml:id="M1" type="part">
  <form>mil</form>
</nym>

Within running text, a name can specify all the nyms associated with it: ...<name nymRef="#B1 #M1">Bogomul</name>... Within a nym, however, the attribute @parts is used to indicate the constituent parts:

<nym xml:id="BM1" parts="#B1 #M1">
  <form>Bogomil</form>
</nym>

The <nym> element may also combine a number of other <nym> elements together, where it is intended to show that they are all regarded as variations on the same root. Thus the different forms of the name John, all being derived from the same Latin root, may be represented as a hierarchic structure like this:

<nym xml:id="J45">
  <form>Iohannes</form>
   <nym xml:id="J450">
     <form xml:lang="en">John</form>
   </nym>
   <nym xml:id="J455">
     <form xml:lang="ru">Ivan</form>
   </nym>
   <nym xml:id="J453">
    <form xml:lang="fr">Jean</form>
   </nym>
</nym>

Formal definitions

The following example schema, called testnym, may be used to test the proposal described here.

<nym>
contains the definition for a canonical name or namepart of any kind
@parts
points to constituent nyms

  <nym xml:id="J452">
    <form>
  <orth xml:lang="en-US">Ian</orth>
  <orth xml:lang="en-x-Scots">Iain</orth>
    </form>
</nym>

Names and nyms

<listNym>
contains a list of nyms, that is, standardized names for any thing.

<listNym type="floral">
  <nym><form>Rose</form></nym>
  <nym><form>Daisy</form></nym>
  <nym><form>Heather</form></nym>
</listNym>

The type attribute may be used to distinguish lists of names of a particular type if convenient.

Names and nyms