Onomastics as an Interdisciplinary Study

Abstract

Onomastics, although an autonomous discipline, overlaps the subject matter of many other disciplines since name use is central to human activity. In its subfield of terminologies or nomenclatures; moreover, onomastics relates to every discipline, subject field, and activity that human beings pursue: We are a species that categorizes and labels. To illustrate this point, we consider briefly the interconnections of onomastics with a number of other disciplines and then look more particularly at the role of placename study as a cross-disciplinary activity.