Geomorfotopônimos históricos

Abstract

Cartographic documents are information sources of great linguistic value to toponymy as they present historical records used as objects of analysis to studies. Considering this perspective, the goals of this work were to describe and analyze the geomorphotoponyms collected from maps of Minas Gerais state in Brazil produced in the Colonial and joanine periods in the sev-enteenth and eighteenth centuries. Based on the assumption that toponymy is closely related to the environment it names, it is proposed to check the presence of the topographic features as-sociated with the relief as a motivational factor in the act of naming the geographic accidents included in the settlement period of Minas Gerais. The theoretical and methodological assump-tions of Dick (1990 a, b, 1999, 2006) and Seabra (2004, 2006) on onomastics and toponymic motivation and Costa et al. (2002, 2004); Resende and Villalta (2007) and Costa, Bueno and Santos (2007) on the historical cartography of Minas Gerais and the historical context of con-solidation of Minas Gerais capitancy were used. As this work is a development of the project Registros Cartográficos Históricos: Revelando o Patrimônio Toponímico de Minas Gerais do Período Colonial ao Joanino (Historical Cartographic Records: Revealing the Toponymic Her-itage of Minas Gerais from the Colonial to the Joanine Period), performed between 2014 and 2016 at the Historical Cartography Reference Center of the Federal University of Minas Gerais (CRCH-UFMG), Santos, Seabra and Costa (2016, 2017) was used as a source of information about the developed project and also to enable the access to the database containing the geo-morphotoponyms that compose the corpus of this research. Through the diachronic bias, 101 geomorphotoponyms collected from the database were analyzed. During the description of the toponymic evolution of our research objects, it was possible to explain variations and changes in the naming of geographical accidents by using Dauzat (1926) and Seabra (2012) as a theo-retical support. The quantitative and qualitative analysis of the studied geomorphomotoponyms allowed the emphasis on the presence and relevance of the relief features in the settlement pe-riod of Minas Gerais region when naming the first villages. Besides, the relation between the studied toponyms and the named surrounding was verified by means of relief portrayal in the maps that compose the cartographic collection used in the research. This work, then, discloses the importance of studying Historical Toponymy as it allows the recovery of historical and cultural aspects of a society.