A TOPONÍMIA INDÍGENA DOS MUNICÍPIOS PARAIBANOS: TERMINOLOGIAS INDICADORAS DE RECURSOS NATURAIS E CONDIÇÕES DE VIDA ENTRE OS SÉCULOS XVIII e XIX

Abstract

Paraíba draws attention for having a significant number of municipalities with names of indigenous origin. However, there is little information about the etymology, structure and taxonomy, much less about the real reasons for choosing that name, that is, the reason that city has that name. Inevitably, this situation interferes with the transmission of data about the history and identity of the inhabitants of that geographic space, and part of the knowledge of that culture ends up being lost. For these reasons, toponymic atlas projects have been undergraduate and postgraduate topics at several universities in the country, such as Mato Grosso do Sul, Sergipe, Minas Gerais, São Paulo, Acre, Bahia, Rio Grande do Sul, Amazonas, and others. . Thus, the idea of a toponymic dictionary has emerged in different parts of Brazil. Therefore, this work is part of the possibility of contributing to a possible atlas or toponymic dictionary of Paraíba. It is from this context that the objective of this course conclusion work is established, that of making a geolinguistic interpretation of these toponyms to arrive at a possible description of how these terminologies add informative data to knowledge about natural resources and living conditions in Paraíba between the 18th and 19th centuries. The studies in this research were based on models from other existing works. For the linguistic study, such as etymology, morphological structure, toponymic taxonomy, more traditional dictionaries of the Tupi language were used, such as Sampaio (1987), Tibiriçá (1984,1985) Bueno, (1987), Cunha (1989), Clerot (1969) and Carvalho (1987) and Navarro (2013). To interpret the data, we followed the postulates in works by Dick (1981, 1990, 1994), as well as by Isquerdo 2019). The results of this research show that the toponyms of municipalities in Paraíba are more associated with physical-natural elements, such as animals, plants, rivers, lakes, coves, forests, hills, mountains. The study of this toponymy revealed knowledge about part of the available natural resources and living conditions in Paraíba in the 18th and 19th centuries. Other toponyms indicated the antiquity and originality of geographic spaces. This research shows that the toponymic study of a geographic area, in fact, "naturally represents a recovery of environmental characteristics perpetuated in place names"(Isquerdo 2019, p. 12).