Nyelvtudományi Közlemények 109. kötet (2013)
Tanulmányok - Rácz, Anita: Ethnic groups and settlement names in Hungary 255
Ethnie groups and settlement names in Hungary 263 fix, but the principal element is a common geographical term which does not belong to the regular list of place-name formants (Besenyőfő, Tótvölgy, Zsidóhavasa etc.). In terms of their structure, such place names with ethnonymic content are the least frequently encountered in the time-frame of the 10th-16th centuries. On the one hand their creation can be explained by metonymy: a place name took on a narrower or a broader meaning, but was after all still linked to an ethnic group, and the new naming was motivated by the possibility of expressing its characteristics through the use of an ethnonym, the resulting micro-names for emerging settlements in the vicinity becoming eponymous and thus, in a metonymic way, turning into settlement names. Generic geographical terms that appear in a settlement name thus indicate primary denotata in the naming, it being named as a particular type of location. On the other hand, this kind of microname > settlement name metonymic shift is not the sole means by which names can evolve. Katalin J. Soltész has written a monograph whose goal is to answer this question: „what do we know about proper names?” In it she states that „for certain name types, the characteristic word elements, prefixes, suffixes, derivational affixes and, in fact, non-functional endings act as name formants, on the basis of which people use the existing model to create new names [...]” (1979: 19). Thus, their existence confirms the status of proper names as linguistic elements, and when name users want to create a new proper name, they draw upon this stock of name formants. And if you have a proliferation of similarly structured settlement names, the name makers get accustomed to the fact that these morphemes may be used in creating settlement names, new village names can be created analogically along the lines of the many existing similar names in the name system, and these start being used directly to form settlement names, then we no longer need to take into consideration the metonymic process. Examining the chronological development of the properties of the basic name forms we can see that the model was established for these name entities in the second half of the 14th century and came to the fore during the first half of the following century. However, due to the small amount of data, I don’t think that very far-reaching conclusions can be drawn. 6 6. Another name type with which I concerned myself are those acts of naming in which the ethnonym serves as the modifier in the first part of the name. The names considered in this group (23.5%) exhibit either a syntagmatic siructure, or so-called name differentiation, in which the modifying prefix serves to bring about the result of complementation. In the latter case, structural changes to an existing settlement name have created new name formations. One characteristic onomastic feature of medieval Hungary is that quite a number of identical names can be found in the name materials of several counties, and there is even the example of one basic name appearing several times
