Theonymy in Brazilian Sign Language: the signs of Orishas

Name-giving and organizing the world through concepts and categories are human acts underlying lexicon production in any language. The lexicon of a language includes proper nouns, which particularize people, places, or things. Onomastics is the field of Linguistics devoted to studying proper names. This article focuses on the proper names of Orishas in Brazilian Sign Language (Libras). It analyzes 10 signs that name Orishas in Libras as to their formal and semantic-motivational aspects and taps into the iconicity underlying the relationships between these signs and their referents that might have influenced their creation. This qualitative, applied study is based on descriptive and documentary methods and draws theoretically on Castro (2001), Sousa (2019; 2022a; 2022b; 2023), and Vidigal and Teixeira (2014). Findings indicate that 7 out of the 10 signs are classified as morphologically simple, while the remaining are compound and constituted by Libras-only formants, i.e., without borrowing from the Portuguese language. Iconicity was found in all signs except for NANAN-BURUKU in the semantic-motivational analysis. Findings point to a strong relationship between the naming of Orishas in Libras and the visual experience of the deaf, especially through the iconic relationship between the signs and their referents.