Vol. 72 No. 1 (2024): NAMES: A Journal of Onomastics
Articles

Navigating Linguistic Similarities Among Countries Using Fuzzy Sets of Proper Names

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  • Davor Lauc
Davor Lauc
University of Zagreb
DOI: https://doi.org/10.5195/names.2023.2569

Published 2024-03-12

Keywords

  • first name,
  • language similarity,
  • language distance,
  • phonetic similarity,
  • socioonomastics,
  • proper name,
  • anthroponomastics
    • ...More
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Copyright (c) 2024 davor lauc

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Abstract

This paper examines the commonalities among several countries and languages through the lens of proper names, especially forenames. It posits that the investigation of these names offers a fresh perspective on language similarity due to their distinct influence from cross-cultural interactions and language contact compared to regular vocabulary. The study introduces a novel measure that generalizes the similarity between sets by considering the distances between elements. This metric is employed to assess phonetic commonalities in forenames. The results of this analysis show a notable correlation between the commonality of proper names across languages and the overarching commonality of the languages themselves. In addition, the forename commonalities also provided more insights. As this investigation shows, proper names can also serve as a potentially potent metric for language similarity and may be used to unveil additional cultural commonalities and disparities among nations. The paper concludes by addressing the constraints of this research and discussing prospects for subsequent studies.

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