Between -polis and -land(s)

o conceito de sufixo toponímico e sua presença em topônimos brasileiros nos séculos XIX e XX

Abstract

Although a sizable portion of research on toponyms touches on suffixal formation, there remains a gap concerning toponymic suffixes—those used almost exclusively in the creation of place names. While the term appears in some Portuguese-language literature, a more thorough search has revealed a lack of dedicated studies on the topic. Two basic types of suffixation are observed in geographical names. The first involves suffixes that are extensively used in the language; in spontaneous toponyms, these are most often diminutives, augmentatives, and collectives. The second type may also arise in spontaneous formations, but in Brazil it has frequently been used deliberately to create place names whose suffixes express the idea of “land of.” Given the relevance of this subject, the paper has three main objectives. The first is to define the concept toponymic suffix in Portuguese. The second aims to provide a robust diachronic survey of the formation of those suffixes that fit this definition and are most common in contemporary Brazil—most notably -pólis and -lândia, which have a long-standing history in toponymic formation, although other suffixes such as -burgo are also addressed. This diachronic overview revisits older naming practices that referred to ethnic groups inhabiting particular territories, typically expressing genitive relations. It also traces the historical path by which full lexical items became the suffixes -lândia and -pólis. The third objective is to understand the behavior of these toponymic suffixes in the naming of Brazilian municipalities. To this end, a corpus of Brazilian place names containing toponymic suffixes applied to human settlements was compiled, based on the geographical nomenclature provided by the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE). In the proposals for new municipality and district names, a progressive increase was observed in the use of genitive-related toponymic suffixes conveying the sense of “land” or “city of,” particularly after the second half of the nineteenth century. The findings confirm the function of toponymic suffixes as topoformants, with -pólis identified as the earliest such suffix in use in Brazil and -lândia as the most frequent, especially in the twentieth century.