Ursula

verdantry asked me to post about onomastic research methods, specifically in the context of raw data for fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Bohemian names.

(If you want to suggest a topic for me to post about in January, you can do so here.)

The first step is to find out what is already known. The Medieval Names Archive section on Czech and Slovak is pretty minimal, and there's nothing relevant in the sca.org name articles collection. You can also check old Academy of Saint Gabriel reports. I would use the advanced search tool to look for Bohemia, setting the "restriction" field to "anything" in order to turn up reports with the word "Bohemian" in them as well. There are actually quite a few hits for Bohemia. I would start with the highest-numbered reports and work backwards, checking the bibliographies to see if anything useful shows up. Indeed, there are references to two books by Ernst Schwarz whose titles start Sudetendeutsche Familiennamen and which appear to include data on Bohemian names. One of these books is available on abebooks.com for about $70 plus $10 shipping from Germany; I haven't checked Amazon or other bookfinding sites. (Both books are also in my university library, which means you could likely get someone close to you to work magic via ILL, or ask me to borrow one and let you pet it, if we're likely to be in the same place at some point.)

The other key part of finding out what's already known is to talk to experts. In this case, your likely experts are going to be Aelfwynn (who knows lots of stuff about German names, and lives in Drachenwald), and ffride (whose expertise includes working stuff out about Slavic names, and who lives in Lochac). Maybe one of them has been sitting on data that they would love to share with you! They may also know some language-specific search tricks.

What if you just want to browse around for raw data? ( Stream of consciousness as I explain some Google tricks! )

I want to emphasize that you don't actually have to know an entire language to browse like this. Being able to pick out names and dates is enough to get started! However, you should be aware that names in some languages, including Latin, change form depending on their grammatical function in a sentence.

I promised to teach a class on medieval names from Africa at Pennsic, so I've been reading up on extant inscriptions. I have a book checked out of the library called Inscriptions Rupestres Libyco-Berbères, which transcribes and translates Berber names recorded in the Tifinagh script, and includes a complete name index. There's only one problem: there are absolutely no dates.

Dating the Tifinagh inscriptions is, of course, extremely hard. We're talking about graffiti scratched into rocks in the Sahara, with messages that say things like "He loves Dali," or at least probably say things like that once you guess all the vowels. But the real problem for me is a classic case of different priorities. Archaeology centered on Roman North Africa, or even better pre-Roman Carthaginian Africa, is a serious industry. It's easy to find articles on classical inscriptions, and it's at least possible to locate articles on classical inscriptions written in Tifinagh. But medieval North African archaeology is a niche interest (even setting aside the problems inherent in referring to "medieval Africa" at all), and nobody has bothered to date later inscriptions more precisely than "These must be post-Islamic conquest because they're using Muslim names."

Or, rather, there is exactly one person who has tried. He hasn't published his transcriptions, just a table of inscription locations that mentions some are "Islamic era" and others are "modern". He did very kindly answer my email and point me at his article on classical inscriptions. That tells me that the word for "son" used to record Roman African names is the same as the one used in Inscriptions Rupestres Libyco-Berbères (up to an unwritten vowel, at least). So it might just barely be possible to construct a Berber name for SCA use now, as long as you choose one that's both in Inscriptions Rupestres Libyco-Berbères and in medieval documents written in Arabic.