Without looking at the archives, I believe that annotate and praise were introduced well after the initial implementation which used blame as the command. I may be wrong, though.
It seems the command is listed as `blame` even in the v1.0 book, but does even then have the `annotate` and `praise` aliases. In all the years I used svn I firmly believed annotate was the canonical form and it was the one I always used, so I've learnt something here (about svn, and maybe about myself).