Syktyvkar City Proper Names
Syktyvkar city proper names are considered. Observations on the live speech of citizens, oral interviews and analysis of information from the Internet resources revealed unofficial names of the city and city objects including districts, streets, parks, individual buildings, shopping centres, apartment complexes and monuments. Not all official place names receive unofficial names, but only those that have bright appearance, or play an important role in citizens’ life. The principles and types of nomination characteristic of unofficial urbanonyms and city names are analysed. It is noted that the causes of appearance of humorous city names like Syvtyvkar, Syktykmyk and so on became the uncomfortable pronunciation of Komi words in other languages, including Russian. It was revealed that the nomination of city objects uses methods of speech compression, metonymy, metaphor, linguistic game. Informal urbanonyms are characterised by brevity, expressiveness, appraisal which are signs of informal speech. Unofficial place-names opposed to the official on the sphere of use. However, in conjunction with the official urbanonyms they form a common cultural space of the city. In the general urbanonymy system the unique features of the language environment of Syktyvkar are fixed. It is shown that Syktyvkar unofficial urbanonymy forms its cultural character, uniqueness and originality of the city.