Folia onomastica Croatica, No. 12/13, 2003.
Review article
The Place of Synchronic Anoiconymical Material in Diachronic Dialectological Research
Milan Harvalík
; Ústav pro jazyk český Akademie v˘ed České republiky, Praha, Česka republiky
Abstract
The first part of the article deals with the possibilities of the use of anoikonyms (minor place-names, in other terminologies also field names or microtoponyms), collected by correspondence inquiry in the territory of Bohemia in 1963– 1980, for the purpose of historical dialectology. A number of names from almost half a million anoikonyms deposited in the Onomastic Section of the Czech Language Institute of the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic in Prague show that numerous dialectal phenomena widely exceeded their present borders in the past. The areas of proper names that have kept a particular dialectal feature usually represent an older developmental stage than contemporary areas of appellatives containing the same dialectal phenomenon, and, therefore, the onymical isogloss mostly delimits a larger territory than the isogloss of the same phenomenon occurring in appellatives. Beside the fact that anoikonyms document the former territorial spread of various dialectal features, they preserve also appellatives that have disappeared from use, old toponymical meanings of some appellatives and extinct phonological dialectal phenomena. Since the anoikonymical questionnaires have been filled in mostly by laymen without special dialectal training, it is not to be supposed that entered forms of names accurately correspond with those really existing and being in use. The problem involves both accurate recording dialectal phenomena and entering literary forms. In the second part, the author analyses the ways of adaptation of dialectal forms of anoikonyms to standard language and presents two basic methods of verification of the state of recorded names: a) their confrontation with appellative parallels - the entered name is being qualified with respect to the present and/or former state of the local dialect and to dialectal appellative forms described in dialectological literature; b) their confrontation with proprial parallels - the phonological, morphological or lexical phenomenon in question is not known in appellative vocabulary nevertheless it has been entered in another anoikonymical questionnaire by another respondent (other respondents), no matter whether all of the forms have been recorded in one locality/region or not.
Keywords
microtoponyms; historical dialectology; Czech toponymy
Hrčak ID:
22320
URI
Publication date:
28.3.2007.
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