METAFORA ÎN TOPONIMIE
Metaphor in Toponymy

Summary/Abstract: Metaphor – the figure of speech found in all the fields of human life – has raised, since the Antiquity, many discussions. Especially, its mechanism of formation and functioning, and its classifications have been the object of numerous studies in rhetoric, philosophy, hermeneutics, poetics, linguistics, semiotics, stylistics, cognitive psychology, etc., and, more recently, in scientific language, because here, the metaphor appears now to compensate the lack of specialized terms. The metaphor also supplies the gap of specialized terms in toponymy; the great variety of forms of geographical space made it necessary the borrowing of nonspecific appellations from the vocabulary of other sciences and from the common language. The analogy is, usually, made with in/animated things (and/or with theirs features), which are part of the micro universe in which men live and work, but also with himself, when the human a person borrows to the surrounding physical world names indicating parts of human body. In this paper we will follow the typology of these terms borrowed to the two levels: a) The level of popular geographic terminology, where various irregularities of the soil are associated with real objects, by virtue of the similarity between them; b) The level of topic names (a part of them also came from popular geographic terms, which became, by toponymy, official denominations of some places).

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