Publishing the place-name collection of Frigyes Pesty (1864)

Abstract

Publishing the place-name collection of Frigyes Pesty (1864)

In 1864 Frigyes Pesty, the historian, decided to have all place-names (including names of mountains, bodies of water, peripheral buildings, fields etc.) in approximately 25,000 settlements of contemporary Hungary collected in the language they were actually used in the villages by the inhabitants. He composed a questionnaire, which was translated into all minority languages used in Hungary at that time. Assisted by the council of governor-general he made the members of the local board (involving local clergymen and school-masters) complete the form. He arranged the questionnaires received into 68 bulky volumes according to contemporaneous (i.e. 1858–1876) administrative units and place them in the Manuscript Archive of the Hungarian National Museum (present-day National Széchényi Library).

This enormous place-name collection has not been exploited for long. It was Attila Szabó T. who first called attention to it, but researchers started to publish names of territories inside today’s borders of the country in a haphazard fashion only in the 1980s. Owing to few enthusiastic scholars’ individual and generous labour some attempts were also made to publish the place-names outside today’s borders of Hungary. After publishing Attila Szabó T.’s excellent Transylvanian place-name collection the Team of Onomastic Sciences in Eötvös Loránd University tries to release Pesty’s place-name data of territories not belonging to Hungary today. The place-names are going to be published in their original language in literal copy to meet the claims of scientific research of Hungarian as well as other languages.

Previous publications, publishable manuscripts, work in progress and tasks of later research have been surveyed before the beginning of the project. The article focuses on the results of this survey.