Factors Influencing the Choise of Names in Literature (Using Examples from J. K. Tyl’s Drama)

Showing all names of J. K. Tyl’s characters was not the purpose of this paper. I wanted to refer to characteristic naming tendencies, to some interesting cases and especially to factors influencing the choice of names. I can illustrate it on the example of the name Krvomír: the selection of this name is conditioned by the literary genre (it is a typical kind of name in a fairy tale), by contemporary poetics (it was a very popular kind of name in literature of the 1830s and 1840s), by function (a calling name characterizes the character by using the semantic meaning of the name: “krev” means blood in Czech). The form of the name is also very interesting, it corresponds with old Slavonic names (cp. Jaromír, Vladimír, Mojmír). However, the name Krvomír is not documented in reality, it is an invention of J. K. Tyl. The creation of this concrete name was influenced by author’s poetics and his inventive approach to names within the framework of the particular naming scheme