Structural Types of Settlement Names Referring to the Natural Environment

Abstract

In this paper I study the structural types of settlement names referring
to the natural environment and highlight what kind of semantic and lexical-
morphological models characterize the particular name structures and
when and in what proportion they appeared in sources of the Old Hungarian
Era. Among the basic name structural types of settlement names referring to
the natural environment, more than half of the name corpus is made up by
single-component settlement names without a formant (56 %, e. g. Kökényér <
Kökény-ér hydronym ‘blackthorn/brook’, Alma < alma ‘apple’, etc.), while
34 % of the names were created as single-component toponyms with formants
(e. g. Erdőd < erdő ‘forest’ + -d topoformant, Somogy < som ‘dogwood’ + -gy
suffix, etc.); this means that the character of the name type is clearly defined by
the single-component structure. Metonymic and morphemic name formation
were used throughout the early Old Hungarian Era to create settlement names.
The proportion of two-component settlement names referring to the natural
environment is only 10 % (e. g. Szamosfalva ‘village/next to the River Szamos’,
Structural Types of Settlement Names Referring to the Natural Environment
Kecskéskér ‘Kér settlement/abounding in goats’, etc.). I could conclude that in
the Hungarian toponymic system compared to single-component names,
two-component settlement names reflecting natural features appeared in sources
from the early Old Hungarian Era not only in a lower number but there are
also differences in the chronology of single-component and two-component
denominations.]