NOTES ON BOLIVIA PLACE NAMES

Abstract

This article focuses on historical, national and cultural aspects of Bolivian place names. The materials used for this article included maps of the Republic of Bolivia, national and bilingual dictionaries, texts and discourses of different types, all of which provided a corpus of 300 units. The origin, motivation, and both the morphological and semantic structure of Bolivian toponyms were analyzed from the semiotic point of view, which allowed evaluating their role in the Bolivians’ worldview, as well as in terms of contacts between different languages and cultures. A special attention was paid to Bolivian demonyms. The results of the analysis make it possible to draw the conclusion that the Bolivian toponymy forms a selfsufficient and flexible system that is constantly developing. It reveals universal features of Latin American, South American and Andean toponymy. It contains native place names that form its solid indigenous substrate due to Quechua and Aymara languages, as well as place names from the period of the conquest of the country by the Europeans and geographical names that emerged during the Independence period. All given features of Bolivia´s toponymy, like in other Spanish-American national toponymies, allow various combinations. The results of the suffix productivity analysis in the word formation of Bolivian demonyms are also presented.