Nyelvtörténeti szempontok az Árpád-kor etnikai vizsgálatához

Absztrakt

Examining the ethnic structure of the population in the Age of the Arpads by means of historical linguistics    

The idea claiming that in the population history of a region we must suppose ethnic groups whose languages generated the place-names of the area is widely accepted both in international and in Hungarian onomastic literature. This diachronically acceptable theory in itself, however, hardly presents a basis if we try to find out about the ethnic structure of the era of the earliest Hungarian written records on the basis of contemporary (synchronic) names. Examining the phenomenon known as "name integration" (i.e. the linguistic adaptation of borrowed names) in foreign literature renders it possible to separate the former namers from the actual users of the names. Regarding its methodology, first it is more practical to observe name integrational processes between Hungarian and languages in contact with Hungarian in a synchronic corpus; this study presents some such tendencies using bi- or trilingual names of 20 settlements of present-day Baranya county.