Cross-Linguistic Onomastic Lexicography: the Dictionary of Medieval Names from European Sources

Abstract

Cross-Linguistic Onomastic Lexicography: the Dictionary of Medieval Names from European Sources  

The paper discusses the international project entitled Dictionary of Medieval Names from European Sources, initiated by European researchers. The authors enumerate the reasons for and the aims of the establishment of this online onomasticon; its contents, structure and technical background are revealed; the editorial guidelines are also presented (with special emphasis on explaining the method of crowd-sourcing, documentation and attribution). The paper underlines the significance of the dictionary, as it can be used in different fields (by linguists, sociologists, historians and the general public); then the authors focus on two basic technical issues of editing: the determination of the head forms and the conditions under which a name is considered a variant of another name. The paper accounts for the features of DMNES that are different from those of Hungarian onomasticons; explains the relevance of the dictionary in Hungarian Onomastics; and finally introduces the blog connected to the project.