Ethnic names and place-names

(Main theses of a research program)

Abstract

Ethnic names and place-names (Main theses of a research program)

Ethnic names play an important role in revealing early Hungarian history. Archeologists and historians even today are interested in the process of Hungarians' settling down in the Carpathian Basin, numerous questions of which are still unanswered. Recently many scholars have emphasized the need to thoroughly uncover the relevant sources and to contrast the achievements of the former and the latest research. By collecting data from several source publications the author of this paper plans to write a monograph in the future examining Old Hungarian settlement-names developed from ethnic names. This analysis will hopefully give answers to general questions that have been worrying experts for a long time: 1. Can we be sure that the inhabitants of the settlements whose names can be connected to foreign ethnic groups were of foreign origin? 2. Could names of settlements developed from ethnic names without a suffix reflect the nationality of the former inhabitants? 3. Could the etymology of microtoponyms in a settlement determine the ethnic group of the inhabitants? 4. When did names of settlements derived from ethnic names develop? 5. Did the scriveners (in the chancellery and in ecclesiastical bodies entrusted with notarial functions) translate the place-names into Hungarian? Apart from answering these questions, it is also important that we: examine the relationship between place-name functions and their realizations in the language, discover the structure of place-names that incorporate ethnic names, and describe the possible changes of these place-names. Another strongly connected problem is that of the names of settlements developed from tribal names of the Hungarian conquest period. This paper presents the outlines and the pillars of the research project.