Autonomastics and vehicle semantics: Toward a provisional typology of autonyms in Egyptian Arabic

Autonyms, a blend of auto- (car) and -nyms (names), constitute a subclass of ergonyms (object names) and a subdomain of onomastics I am prone to term ‘autonomastics’, a subdivision which is still understudied rather unstudied. No past research has investigated autonyms as novel tradenames dealers and purchasers assign to cars in automotive transactions. The onomastic facets of autonyms have received no attention from specialist linguists across or within world languages. This article aims to conduct a seminal lexical-semiotic analysis of ‘autonyms’ (car names). A lexicosemiotic analysis of autonyms in Egyptian Arabic is conducted by analysing their lexical and semiotic aspects with particular focus on onomastic and sign-based classifications. The article undertakes a typological analysis of a convenience sample of a dataset extracted from three e-platforms (Dubizzle, Youm7, and Masrawy) and validated through an inter-rater reliability questionnaire. The analysis draws mainly on a comprehensive but non-exhaustive state-of-the-art typology of denominata and denominating practices. Results show that car trademarks are transacted on the local Egyptian market under culture-specific tradenames which establish iconic, indexical, and symbolic relations between the representamens and their objects. The tradenames cover a myriad of autonyms denoting animals (zoonyms), insects (entomonyms), reptiles (herpetonyms), fish (ichthyonyms), birds (ornithonyms), and objects (ergonyms). It shows the role of Egyptian Arabic vernacular in communicating collective cognition of naming practices in the Egyptian automotive community. The article recommends replicating the devised typology with crosslinguistic and cross-cultural datasets to inform future research into onomastics in general and autonomastics in particular and probably inspire automobile industries to redesign their cars accordingly.