Challenges Entered: Down the Rabbit Hole, The Planning Stages
Projects: Articles on 14th-16th century Czech orthography, 14th-16th century Bohemian bynames,
14th-16th century Czech Orthography
In the process of researching 14th-16th century Czech names for my own name registration, I realized that I didn’t know how Czech orthography had changed over the centuries. For nearly all languages, of course, there are shifts over time, but this question is particularly of interest in languages that use diacritical marks. Particularly for name submissions to the SCA College of Arms, where we register the period spelling whenever possible, it’s important to know what period spellings look like, both for submitting the most period-appropriate form and for evaluating sources in the research process.
With Czech names in particular, post-period secondary sources have a frustrating tendency to normalize the spelling of names, which seems primarily to be because Czech orthography in SCA period was (a) not standardized at all until the fifteenth century, and (b) different from modern Czech orthography in a couple of fairly key ways. So, in the process of hunting down what the most common period spelling of Anéžka was likely to be (and in trying to decipher the 15th c. manuscripts I had found), I fell down a rabbithole of learning about the history of Czech orthography.
For full details see https://orandvert.blogspot.com/2021/05/laurels-challenge-down-rabbit-hole-with.html
The Planning Stages: An article on 14th-16th century Bohemian bynames
A project that I’ve had on my docket for a while now is to write an article on the types of bynames found in 14th-16th century Bohemia. The SCA College of Arms has historically lacked English-language sources or data on this specific culture, which makes research difficult for the average heraldic submitter (or even the average consulting herald). In the course of researching my name for submission, I came across two master’s theses from students at Masaryk University in Brno (Marta Štefková[1] and Eva Vepřeková[2]), both of which include Czech names from the period in question. My goal is to catalog the names in those papers, analyze and describe the way they’re formed, and put this information into a format that’s accessible to English-speaking non-experts, using the framework outlined in Aryanhwy merch Catmael’s “So you want to write an onomastic article?” (http://www.nomic.net/~liana/names/howto.pdf).
In the planning process for any project, I always need to account for possible scope creep. There are two main areas I can see this project expanding into: (1) an additional or supplementary paper on given names in the same sources, and (2) a proposal for an update to the Czech section of SENA Appendix A, which is the appendix describing naming patterns that are sufficiently common and well-documented to not require further documentation (http://heraldry.sca.org/sena.html#AppendixA). We do currently have some English-language sources for Czech given names, but these papers from Štefková and Vepřeková significantly expand the existing names pool, and it would be easy enough to collect given-name data at the same time as byname data. The process of data analysis, as well, will provide the necessary support for an update to Appendix A. The hard part here will be waiting to do both of those secondary projects until the main one is complete.
For the data-gathering part of the process, the two main things I need to do are to translate Štefková’s paper into English (since it deals specifically with names, rather than pure transcription of a broader corpus, and thus has some analysis I’d like to incorporate) and to catalog all of the names that appear in both papers by date. Translating Štefková’s paper will be primarily done using Google translate, as my Czech isn’t good enough for that yet, so while I know I’ll miss some nuance, it’ll go relatively quickly, and the broad strokes should be enough for my purposes at the moment. Both papers have indexes of the names that appear throughout their primary sources, so it should be reasonably straightforward, if time-consuming, to import them into a spreadsheet. I may also need to compare the names found in Vepřeková’s index against the same names found in the body of the text, as she somewhat normalizes the names in the index for ease of searching.
At that point, I can start looking for patterns in the data. Regardless of whether I ultimately use the data to propose an update to SENA Appendix A, the categories of name types and naming patterns referenced there are a useful framework, so I’ll use that as a set of guidelines for what to look for. Those categories are: double given, locative, patronymic, other relationship, descriptive/occupational, dictus, and double bynames. For each category that I find, I’ll need to mark them in my spreadsheet so I can filter by type and assess how they appear to typically be formed. I also intend to filter by gender, where indicated, and see if there are typically gender markers in bynames, and if so, what they are.
Besides the grammatical and etymological analysis of individual bynames, I also intend to look at the naming patterns present in the dataset - whether individuals used more than a single given name and a single byname, and whether there were any restrictions on what types of names or name elements are found in what position.
In writing the article, I’ll first need to describe my sources and what their sources are. Because I’m working from secondary sources rather than primary, I need to note what editorial transcription practices each author used; I have a brief note about that for both authors from when I referenced them in my name submission, but I’d like to do a little bit more digging into what Štefková says about her transcription practices, because the names in her paper are suspiciously regular, so I’m skeptical that she didn’t actually normalize them.
The structure of the article otherwise is pretty straightforward: describe the patterns I see, under their own headings, and provide my raw data so that readers can (a) check my work for themselves and (b) use the data as a name-list to assist in SCA name consults. Since the Medieval Names Archive is both an excellent repository of onomastic articles of the type I’m planning, and the intended destination for this article, I’m looking to articles already published there as my model, in particular “Bynames from 15-17th century Latvia” by ffride wlffsdotter (https://www.s-gabriel.org/names/ffride/latvian_bynames.html).
An important step at the end of this process, that I often forget, is to make sure all my working documents are properly organized such that I can look back and use them as a jumping-off point for future projects, when I’m finished. Frequently I end up with a pile of notes that made perfect sense to me at the time, but require a lot of effort to decipher after I’m no longer immersed in the project anymore, so I should take some time at the end of the project to make sure I’ve got them all bundled together in a single folder, with a reference document to explain where I put everything and why. This will also be useful if I do end up allowing myself the scope creep described above, as I’ll likely take some time between projects to prevent burnout, and coming back to a well-organized set of notes will be immensely helpful.
[1]: Štefková, Marta. Antroponyma v urbářích z 15.–17. století. (Brno, 2010). (https://is.muni.cz/th/u1ye5/)
[2]: Vepřeková, Eva. Edice Nejstarší městské knihy litovelské. (Brno, 2011). (https://is.muni.cz/th/z03m5/)
Scolastica la souriete wrote on June 7th, 2021
This sounds like a WONDERFUL project! Looking forward to seeing your final result!
Guðrún Sveinsdóttir (Rosie of Mtn Freehold) wrote on June 7th, 2021
This is so interesting! I know next to nothing about Czech culture in period, let alone how to figure out the naming practices. It's great to see your research on this topic...thank you for teaching me something new!
Jan Janowicz Bogdanski wrote on June 1st, 2021
As one who has done research into naming practices and heraldry in "other" parts of Europe, I understand the difficulties involved here. This is some *fantastic* stuff.!
Morwenna O Hurlihie wrote on May 31st, 2021
I know diddly about heraldry and most anything about central Europe. These are such amazing rabbit holes. I'm so glad that you're finding something fascinating and working hard to make it more accessible to folks.
Isabel del Okes wrote on May 27th, 2021
Wow! Thank you for doing this work. It is great that you are doing such detailed research to help others and further knowledge in an understudied language.