By Bashir Uba Ibrahim, Ph.D.
Onomastics is the study of names and the naming of objects, places, and things. Its two main branches are anthroponymy and toponymy. While the former is concerned with individual proper names, family names, or surnames, the latter is interested in studying the motivations behind the proper names of places. This article is interested in toponymy—changing the names of places. Thus, it aims to synthesise the nexus between onomastics and history in naming places and how some circumstances trigger their penultimate changes.
One of the impetuses behind this article is a Facebook post by Dr. Abdullahi Dahiru, a physician and public commentator, regarding the renaming of “Kunchi” Local Government to “Ghari.” In his post, he attributes this change to a distortion of history, citing Prof. Tijjani Naniya’s views on the etymology of “Kunchi” as historically linked to the bravery of its people.
As a fortress town established to shield Kano from the external aggression of Damagaram, which sporadically attacked Kano in ancient times, the people of Kunchi successfully obliterated and defeated Damagaram infinitum. Thus, they were tagged by the Kano people as “Kun ci”, meaning “you have won”. As time passed, the phrase blended and metamorphosed to “Kunchi”. Henceforth, the town is called “Kunchi”, according to Prof. Naniya, cited by Dr. Abdullahi Dahiru. Therefore, the semantic change of the word was purely motivated by an extralinguistic factor, as the hardship and backwardness faced by the people of Kunchi were onomastically attributed to the pejorative nomenclature of the word in Hausa.
This scenario is called semantic and morphological change through blending in linguistics, a situation whereby the structure and meaning of the word change over time. Many types of semantic changes exist, including Broadening, Amelioration, Semantic Reclamation, and Pejoration.
The fourth one, “pejoration”, is where a semantic change of the word “kun ci” to “kunchi” falls. According to John (2000: 55), “pejoration is when the word’s meaning changes from positive to negative”. It usually occurs due to the extralinguistic factor or associating it with the taboo, as the name “kunchi” in Hausa is pejoratively associated with the taboo or something negative.
Meanwhile, the stigma that the name “kunchi” pejoratively carries in Hausa and the negative stereotype it connotes make the people of the area opt to change the name of their local government. This will be a significant setback to the town’s history because, as time goes on, the upcoming generation from there will not know the history of their forefathers and their bravery in warfare.
On the other hand, semantic anomalies—those who believe there is no relationship between a word and what it stands for—triumph over analogists, who argue that word meaning represents what it stands for. Thus, the historical and semantic imports of the word “kun ci,” which was subsequently transformed to “Kunchi,” were not only changed but also its whole structure and form were replaced, displaced, and dislocated.
Finally, this is not the first time a place or city name has changed. Historically, we have seen how some places or cities’ names change due to varied circumstances. For instance, Mumbai, the capital of India, was formerly known as Bombay. But when the nationalist party Shiv Sena rose to power in 1995, it changed Bombay’s name to Mumbai, citing that the former name carries relics of British colonial legacy.
Similarly, Istanbul, the capital of Turkey, was formerly known as Constantinople for hundreds of years. It was renamed Istanbul in 1930 after the Republic of Turkey was created. Therefore, changing place names is normal, depending on the circumstances and historical events that motivated them.
NB:
Dr. Raji Bello draws my attention that the case of the historical change of the name of “Kunchi” to “Gari” is similar to Lynchburg, Virginia, Black American people whose nomenclature of their city etymologically derived from the historical event of their racial subjugation and maltreatment and want the name of their town change.
Dr. Bashir Uba Ibrahim wrote from the Department of English and Literary Studies, Sule Lamido University Kafin Hausa, Jigawa State.