Changes in the correlation system of settlement-names derived from church names
Abstract
Changes in the correlation system of settlement-names derived from church names
Since the 11th century in Hungary a few inhabited places have been named from the saint to whom the church of the settlement was dedicated. As a consequence settlements having churches, monasteries or other religious buildings dedicated to the same patron saint or to patron saints of the same name could get identical names, which made their localization difficult. To differentiate these identical place-names a distinctive addition (an affix referring to one particular characteristic of the settlement: e.g. its size, its age, its (former) owner, its inhabitants, a surrounding river, mountain or other place etc.) was added to them, a method popular in the naming process with respect to identical place-names of any type. Place-name correlations born in this way display many interesting linguistic and extralinguistic features, some of which are treated in this paper. It has been observed by the author that since the 13th century more and more identical place-names of church name origin have been differentiated with the help of distinctive additions, thus over the centuries up to now with the extension of people's scope of vision this system of place-name correlations has become more and more extended. These differentiated place-names have been particularly popular in Transdanubia, in Transylvania and beyond the river Dráva. The distinctive additions of the differentiated place-names can be divided into distinct semantic categories. The author examines the frequency of distinctive additions appeared until the 15th and in the later centuries, proving that in each period the distinctive additions used most frequently belonged to different semantic classes. Sometimes the distinctive additions of these place-names changed during the centuries: in most cases they were substituted by other differentiating elements, or they disappeared in the course of time.
