Particularidades del uso de nombres bíblicos en el repertorio cubano del siglo XIX

Particularities about the use of biblical names in the Cuban repertoire of the 19th century

Abstract

The presence of biblical names in the Cuban denominative system of the 19th century is related to historical, political and social conditions of the time, such as the officialization of the act of naming by the Catholic Church through baptismal certificates and the absence of a state body that filled this role for most of the century. Due to these particularities, it was necessary to construct the concept of a common given name, to facilitate work with documents of non-religious origin. To identify some peculiarities about this type of names, the data of 5,287 people collected in an official military document of the time was studied. The work with this corpus showed the need to carry out a normalization process through which the variant with the highest frequency of appearance was used to represent the name and in special cases the one that best adjusted to the spelling standards in force today. After analyzing this corpus, a total of 57 simple names of biblical origin were identified. A high concentration of use was evident for some names, of which José, Juan, Pedro and Rafael exceed 2% frequency. Most of these names coincide with the members of the Holy Family spread by Catholicism, the disciples of Jesus and other apostles of the New Testament. Regarding compound names, the preference was identified for the names Juan and José, in most cases as the first compositional element of the given name. As a result of the research, a group of orthographic variations were noticed, among which the hesitation at the accent level stands out and to a lesser extent consonantal changes. This study in general aims to provide new tools for the characterization of the Cuban anthroponymic system.