The starry sky of Mato Grosso do Sul: an essay on astrotoponymy
Keywords:
astrotoponymy, universe, culture, communities, lexicon.Abstract
Astrotoponymy is a line of research consolidated in the European Universities: constellations and galaxies are regarded as places in the sky space. As the place names of our planet, they have their own names. This paper is a pioneer one in this specific field of studies in Brazil, because for the very first time the starry sky is a matter of investigation in the area of Onomastics. This essay aims at identifying how the linguistic communities of Mato Grosso do Sul create their own anthrop-cultural universe. The corpus under analysis consists of denominations listed in two letters taken from the lexical-semantic survey of Atlas Linguístico de Mato Grosso do Sul (ALMS), namely, QSL 0035.a – três marias (Three Marias) and QSL 0036.a – via láctea (Milky Way).