Do you know what eponymy is? Perhaps you've never heard of it, but you've certainly used eponymous words several times without thinking about them very carefully. Well, the Portuguese language is a box of surprises, there are always things to be discovered and many trivia that explain the origin of words, after all, words are born from somewhere, right?
The eponymy, a complicated name to explain a simple concept, consists in transforming proper names into common names. Looking at the root of the word, we realize that epi means about, and anonymous means Name, that is, words about names. It is a kind of neologism, as it creates new words from others. Let's look at some examples, many of them are our old acquaintances, note:
Sandwich: Surely you love sandwiches, right? For now, every time you taste this gastronomic wonder, suitable for a quick meal and, by the way, unhealthy, you will remember John Montagu IV, the Earl of Sandwich (1718-1792), who asked his cook to prepare a simple meal, made with slices of bread and meat to be enjoyed while he was at the table playing.
Guillotine: The guillotine is a decapitation instrument for those sentenced to death, you already know that. What you don't know is that the word guillotine comes from the name of its inventor, the French physician Joseph-Ignace Guillotin. A rather macabre tribute, don't you think?
Diesel: The word diesel is of English origin and serves to name a type of fuel derived from petroleum. Know that this word did not come by chance, it was used for this purpose with the intention of to honor the German Rudolph Diesel, who was responsible for developing and patenting the engine that received the your name.
Pasteurization: The process of sterilizing milk through high temperatures to kill the germs of fermentations got its name because it was created by scientist Louis Pasteur in 1864.
Zeppelin: Large airship made with a metal shell and used for crossing the Atlantic, was named after its inventor, the German military and engineer Ferdinand von Zeppelin.
braille: Braille is a writing system for the visually impaired that grew out of a reading-in-the-dark system, initially developed by Charles Barbier for military purposes. When Frenchman Louis Braille, a teacher who had lost his sight as a child, discovered the method invented by Barbier, he began to use it, later modifying it.
Ampere: Electric current intensity measurement unit, this concept of Physics was named after the physicist who discovered it, the Frenchman André Marie Ampère. In fact, in the field of Science, we find a multitude of examples of eponymy, as scientists used to baptize their discoveries with their own name.
Did you see? You probably knew many of our examples of eponyms, didn't you? The eponymy is a type of neologism, as it creates new words through proper names. If you were curious about the origin of the words, do a search and you will surely find that the eponymy is a recurrent phenomenon in our language and that the tribute does not always please the “honored”.
By Luana Castro
Graduated in Letters
