Reading the space of village. Microtoponymy on the Polish and Ruthenian borderland in the process of socio-political changes
Lukasz KARPECKI, University of Warsaw, Poland
Microtoponymy, as a part of toponymy, is a kind of bridge between linguistics and geography. It is indispensably connected with space, place, man, and language. Nowadays, as a result of the cultural turn that we have been observing for years in many fields of social science, a new approach is possible in the study of proper names of places. Moreover, this turn was the basis for the creation of such sub-disciplines as cultural onomastics and anthropogeography. Assumptions of the research, the preliminary results of which I want to present, could arise only as a result of the coexistence of several fields of science (e.g. onomastics, geography, anthropology, microhistory). Approaching the name of places from only one perspective would not allow us to create (recreate) a relatively complete picture of the phenomenon of naming places and using these names to tame space and its organization.
During the speech, I will present the main assumptions of the ongoing research based on proper field names collected in the area of Polish and Ruthenian borderland. The key part of the presentation will be the results of the archival and field research focused on Nowosiolki Dydynskie as an example of a village of the cultural borderland. I will present a diachronic analysis of names excerpted from land cadasters of Galicia in Austro-Hungarian Empire, 19th-century Galician maps, 20th-century WIG maps, as well as from interviews with representatives of three generations: 1. people born before 1945; 2. people born after 1945; 3. people born after 1990. Furthermore, I will present a preliminary categorization of the completed collection of microtoponyms (e.g. proper names of parts of villages, fields, meadows, pastures, hills, wilderness, forests) showing some etymologies and the evolutionary processes occurring in the microtoponymic landscape of a given village over the centuries as a result of socio-political changes.
Mots clés : Anthropogeography|Microtoponymy|Cultural onomastic|Microhistory|Borderland
A104616LK