Apie gyvenvietės pavadinimą „Salantai“ ir asmenvardžių tyrimą

ZIGMAS ZINKEVIČIUS ON THE SETTLEMENT NAME SALANTAI AND THE STUDY OF PERSONAL NAMES The impetus for this article came from two articles by the linguist Pranas Kniūkšta, who originated from the Salantai region, published in the journal Kalbos kultūra1 a few years ago, but which came into the author's hands only recently. They contain much important data gathered from the register of baptismal entries of the Salantai church for 1631–1640. The data presented in the article on the replacement of the settlement name Skilandžiai with a name derived from the very archaic river name Sālantas are presented carefully and thoroughly. They are highly valuable. The foreign-language forms in the baptismal records are viewed critically. And rightly so, since forms in the living language are always incomparably more precise and authentic than those found in foreign-language documents, where they have been distorted unconsciously and sometimes deliberately2. Young researchers of names should take this principle firmly to heart. It will greatly contribute to the success of their work. However, the treatment of the 17th-century personal names presented in the articles (most of them in the second article) is quite problematic. Contemporary anthroponymic terminology, especially surname, is being applied here artificially to those times. This should not occur in scholarly work. After all, in the 17th century, only the nobility had surnames (their distinguishing feature being hereditary transmission). Ordinary people, especially in the provinces, still used non-hereditary personal names, which, to distinguish them from hereditary surnames, are usually called by-names. They derived from various kinds of qualifying words, used since time immemorial before the name. Therefore, the term by-name is proposed for them. They may also simply be called personal names, of course, if we have no evidence that a particular name is already a hereditary surname. Calling all such seventeenth-century personal names surnames complicates the exposition and makes it difficult to understand. The author of the articles is compelled to use the term false surnames (p. 208)—so why is the term surname needed in the text at all? Understandable 1 Pranas Kniūkšta. Salantų vardas dviejose XVII a. krikšto įrašų knygose. – Kalbos kultūra 81, 103–111; Pranas Kniūkšta. Barzdžių kaimo XVII amžiaus pavardės. – Kalbos kultūra 83, 202–210. 2 This is emphasized in a recently published book: Zigmas Zinkevičius. Ukmergės rajono gyvenviečių vardynas: Pavadinimų kilmė. Vilnius: Institute of the Lithuanian Language, 2011 (see especially p. 10). Pastabos / Notes 145 ZIGMAS ZINKEVIČIUS even to misunderstandings, such as the claim that “since the mid-nineteenth century, there was not a single one of those surnames in Burzdžiai that is directly recorded in seventeenth-century entries” (p. 207). Of course, there could not have been any, since the seventeenth-century entries record personal names that had not yet become hereditary, not surnames. The precision of the exposition was clouded by vague terms such as patronymic surnames instead of the precise term (non-hereditary) patronymics. The author’s excuse that non-hereditary personal names can supposedly be called surnames because they “come after the given name” (p. 203) is entirely unconvincing, since it ignores the most important characteristic of a surname: its hereditary nature. The author even begins to doubt the appropriateness of using the term surname in his own text. This is evident from statements such as “if such patronymics can be called surnames” (p. 206), and so on. The inappropriate use of the term surname in a scholarly work will, of course, not mislead specialists, but it will make it more difficult to use the valuable anthroponymic data, collected with great care and diligence. Received on 2 March 2012. 146 Acta Linguistica Lithuanica LXVI