Os nomes históricos dos municípios de Minas Gerais

Abstract

Toponymic studies are an applied part of linguistics that are dedicated to place names, in order to demonstrate their great importance for the knowledge of the historical-cultural aspects of a people and a society. Considering that the group's culture is decisive in conducting the denominative know-how, which is responsible for the new designation series that form the lexical chain, the research directs its focus to the historical names of the municipalities of Minas Gerais. According to the toponymic taxonomy model proposed by Dick (1990a), historiotoponyms are classified as names of places related to social-historical movements and their members, as well as the corresponding dates. This research extends this tax even further, including the anthroponyms that became historic naming municipalities in Minas Gerais. Based on theoretical and methodological assumptions proposed by Dauzat (1926), Dick (1990a), Seabra (2004) and Faria (2017), we work with two corpora: one of contemporary data and the other of historical data. We counted 119 historiotoponyms, proposing a subdivision for them into 4 categories, namely, international, national, state and municipal. After quantitative and qualitative analyses, relating them to reality and culture, we adopted the model for anthropotoponyms proposed by Faria (2017), which expands Dick's model (1990a) for this taxe. We saw that the study of historical anthroponyms addressed in this research made it possible to understand and learn more about the culture and history of the state of Minas Gerais. In addition, it became clear that historical anthroponyms are important, since they can be seen as a tool capable of reconstructing the past and keeping the memory of important achievements of some personalities for society.