REVIEWS

Maciejauskienė V. Lietuvių pavardžių susidarymas. „Mokslas“, 1991. 320 p.

Vitalija Maciejauskienė is one of the devoted researchers of Lithuanian historical anthroponymy; for nearly two decades, alongside the study of the living Lithuanian name stock, she has consistently and meticulously investigated Lithuanian personal names recorded in various documents. It is gratifying that we have received a fine monograph summarizing many of her earlier works and new research.

Lithuanian historical anthroponymy, which attracts the attention not only of linguists (dialectologists, etymologists, lexicologists, researchers of language history and word formation!) but also of specialists in other fields (historians, ethnographers, archaeologists, etc.), has few major works offering comprehensive syntheses; the publication of the book under review is therefore highly timely and welcome.

The author of the monograph, having studied for many years the complex and immensely broad problem of the development of Lithuanian personal naming and the formation of surnames, brings her research together. The principal themes of the work are: the two-part naming of individuals, the formation and eventual consolidation of Lithuanian surnames, features of surname stabilization, sources of surname origins, and the development of women’s naming.

The book first discusses the most important works in Lithuanian historical anthroponymy and the understanding of more common terms and concepts, and describes the sources and materials.

All the claims and conclusions of the work are based on an immense body of material—a card index of approximately 110,000 anthroponyms spanning several centuries. The material was collected from published and manuscript documents of various kinds dating from the thirteenth to the eighteenth centuries. Throughout the book, authentic forms of personal names recorded in the documents are provided with precise source details. The publication is also valuable because more than one researcher will be able to make use of the data from published archival sources. Of course, an index of personal names would make this unique material much easier to use. On the other hand, a register of so many thousands of entries would at the very least have doubled the book’s length. Moreover, it is not too late to undertake this work now—it could be an exceptionally valuable supplement to the existing book.

The present-day system of personal-name nomenclature (with all its morphological features) firmly embodies the two-part Lithuanian naming convention of a given name and surname (it is worth adding here that the Latvian and Lithuanian anthroponymic naming formulas coincide—the Latvian form of personal naming is also two-part, e.g., Jānis Rugainis). However, this was not always the case. The path from naming a person by a single name (a historical universal shared by almost all peoples) to naming them by a given name and surname is the complex path traversed by our present-day surname; its principal stages are analyzed in the monograph’s five chapters.

The first chapter examines the establishment of two-part naming. It discusses the four principal ways of naming individuals (by one personal name; by a personal name and an appellative or descriptive nickname; by two personal names; and by three personal names), which were productive to varying degrees in different periods. Analysis of documents spanning several centuries reveals the impor-

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…most important stages in the development of the Lithuanian anthroponymic system. V. Maciejauskienė is the only researcher of our anthroponymy to have systematically surveyed such a long period in the functioning of personal names, discussing separately the ways people were named in the periods before the 16th century and in the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries, and clearly showing how naming by a single national personal name gave way to a two-part system of personal naming.

The second chapter of the monograph analyzes the process by which Lithuanian surnames took shape. After discussing the definition of a surname, the author examines the specific features of this complex process in different periods: the 15th, 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries. She describes the characteristics of the anthroponymic system’s development in each period, the emergence of surnames among different social strata (the nobility and the peasantry), and sometimes compares personal names in specific historical sources with present-day surnames from the same region. The results of this painstaking research show that Lithuanian surnames began to form as early as the 15th century. The most intensive period of surname formation was the 17th century, while by the 18th century the process was essentially complete. At the end of the chapter, the findings are compared with the emergence of surnames among some other peoples, our neighbors.

The third chapter is devoted to the specific features of surname stabilization. Since Lithuanian surnames—and their eventual standardization—were influenced by various linguistic and extralinguistic factors whose impact on our surnames cannot be ignored, the author of the monograph, able to compare personal names from the same territory in different periods, discusses a wide range of surname variants and their structural, phonetic, and graphic differences, and provides examples of particular variants. Two important features of Lithuanian surname formation are discussed separately: the dropping of patronymic suffixes and the Slavicization of Lithuanian surnames. V. Maciejauskienė’s research largely confirms earlier scholars’ observations on the ways Lithuanian surnames were Slavicized and the specific features of this process in different historical periods, but one might have expected somewhat more from this chapter. Although the Slavicization of personal names was not the author’s primary focus, the nature of the material examined and the opportunity to compare personal names from a particular region across different periods were, in many cases, especially conducive to more detailed study of how Slavicization proceeded and perhaps of its causes as well. Of course, as the author herself states, the long and complex process of Slavicizing Lithuanian personal names should be the subject of further research.

The fourth chapter examines the sources of Lithuanian surnames and the frequency of personal names of different origins in various periods. It presents three main groups of surnames distinguished by origin—surnames derived: 1) from baptismal names; 2) from various Lithuanian personal names of nickname origin, mostly simplex and, more rarely, compound; and 3) from old two-stem Lithuanian personal names.

The author of the monograph remains faithful to the position she and the other authors of the “Dictionary of Lithuanian Surnames” have taken: she does not recognize another stratum of personal names that gave rise to our surnames—short forms of old pre-Christian Lithuanian two-stem names and their suffixed derivatives—which many researchers of anthroponymy distinguish as a separate group (K. Būga, A. Salys, Z. Zinkevičius, B. Savukynas, et al.). Understandably, this is the stratum that poses the greatest difficulties for researchers, not least because many personal names of this type have stems…

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…with corresponding forms among various appellatives. However, there seems to be no basis for assigning the surnames Biwevną, Boreyszą, Butą, Bulko, Butkus, Daugis, Daugnis, Gaylenis, Gaylus and others to the group of surnames originating from nicknames or from names for occupations, crafts, or nationalities (pp. 225, 237, 238), especially since the author here contradicts her own position (see “Dictionary of Lithuanian Surnames”).

The derivational analysis of surnames also raises doubts. For some reason, the discussion of suffixal derivatives does not even mention derivatives with the affixes -enis, -eika, -eikis, and others, which specific examples show to have been no less popular than derivatives formed with some of the other suffixes discussed (e.g., -iškis).

The fifth chapter of the book is devoted to the development of women’s naming. This is a very topical and little-studied problem in our anthroponymy. Although the studies cited are based on a considerably smaller body of material than that available for men’s personal names, and the author does not state definitive conclusions, they nevertheless provide a general picture of women’s naming from the 16th to the 18th century, as well as of the formation and structure of women’s surnames. It is unfortunate that the relatively small number of recorded women’s names cannot show the full diversity of women’s naming, especially the structural features of women’s personal names characteristic of individual Lithuanian regions, since only a small area of eastern Lithuania is represented. Perhaps this is why the author treats the addition of the suffixes -aičia, -yčia, and -ūčia to the stems of different men’s surnames as exceptional (pp. 285, 297, etc.), although other sources and the present-day use of women’s personal names in dialects show that this is quite common. Research into the naming of Lithuanian women still awaits further scholars, but V. Maciejauskienė’s work is an important beginning.

The monograph “The Formation of Lithuanian Surnames” does not attempt to resolve the more complex theoretical problems of Lithuanian anthroponymy, but it is a major empirical study. Owing to the abundance and authenticity of its data, and the flawless interpretation of most of it, this book will attract the attention not only of onomastics specialists and other scholars of Lithuanian and Baltic studies, but also of Indo-Europeanists.

Mildo Norkaitienė, Meilutė Ramonienė

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