Linguistic layers of Old Hungarian hydronyms

Abstract

When analysing the etymological layers of Hungarian river names, it becomes soon clear that loan names make up a much larger group than in the group of settlement names, for instance. This fact can be due to the phenomenon that in the case of hydronyms, name-giving and name-usage is driven mainly by communicative needs, while other (e. g. socio-cultural or political) factors only rarely influence name-giving. In my paper, it was my aim to provide an etymological typology of Hungarian hydronyms from the Árpád-era (896 –1350). It seems to be justified to choose the Hungarian hydronyms of the Árpád-era as the corpus of my investigation, for the country was strongly multilingual and multiethnic in this period of time (Hungarian, Slavic, German, Turkish), which also has an effect on the system of water names. The survey of the linguistic layers of river names shows that largely the same semantic content appears in river names originating from different languages. The semantic types appearing in river names belong to the so-called panchronistic feature of the hydronym system, in other words, they show signs of universal human thinking.