Anoikonyms in Czech and Slovak Anoikonymical Dictionaries as a Source for the Research into Historical Dialectology

0502705 - ÚJČ 2019 RIV FR eng J - Journal Article
Harvalík, Milan - Valentová, I.
Anoikonyms in Czech and Slovak Anoikonymical Dictionaries as a Source for the Research into Historical Dialectology.
Nouvelle revue d’onomastique. -, č. 60 (2018), s. 147-154. ISSN 0755-7752.
[Noms de lieux, noms de personnes. La question des sources. Paříž, 02.12.2015-05.12.2015]
Institutional support: RVO:68378092
Keywords : Czech language * Slovak language * historical dialectology * anoikonyms
OECD category: Linguistics

The sources documenting the history of Czech and Slovak dialects are limited to surviving written material of very varied character. Most of these documents are however written in standard language with a more or less random occurrence of dialectal phenomena. Without knowledge of the “living” speech, however, diachronic written material is necessarily limited and its heterogeneity and a lack of comprehensiveness in terms of area and time make it somewhat unreliable. Therefore, historical dialectology requires a sufficient quantity of documents from the same period and a contiguous area, which is an objective hardly possible to achieve using only appellative evidence found in written documents. A suitable complementary source material that meets all the criteria above are anoikonyms, which are characterised by a fixed link to a specific object or feature in the landscape and can therefore indicate the development status of the language in the given territory at the specific time. This paper points out how the synchronic anoikonymical material from the Czech and Slovak dictionaries of anoikonyms can be used when studying Czech and Slovak dialects from diachronic perspective.
Permanent Link: http://hdl.handle.net/11104/0294697