A Linguistic Inquiry on Low Franconian Toponyms in Transylvania
A Linguistic Inquiry on Low Franconian Toponyms in Transylvania

Summary/Abstract: While words are arbitrary in a lexical sense, names are bestowed on the basis of what they may have come to represent. Besides the capacity of identity-building, place names (toponyms) in particular provide linkage between land, population and cultural heritage. Toponomastics (also referred to as toponymy) – which is the study of place names – has accordingly been used as an auxiliary discipline in service of other scientific areas such as geography and historiography. Research on the etymology of toponyms has been used in an effort to describe the multiethnic, multicultural, plurilingual and multiconfessional environment of Transylvania. While Bóna considers that “c’est la toponymie hongroise qui domine l’ensemble de la Transylvanie”, a toponymic analysis of the region is no evident task as many names have travelled through several languages – a fact that has raised many etymological debates. However, not all toponyms are drowned in the same mystery. In their work, Rácz and Tóth have solely utilized place names derived from ethnonyms in an attempt to reconstruct the ethno-demographic composition of the Carpathian Basin in the centuries after the Hungarian settlement. The sole use of ethnic names ascribed to a people or group causes the evidence to be handled with some discretion. In the identification of the ethnic composition of an area in the given period, severely less attention goes to what Rácz and Tóth call loan-toponyms: toponyms that were borrowed from a non-Hungarian language due to the settlement of other ethnic groups in the area.

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