Male first names in the town of Kleszczele and its vicinity in Podlasie in the mid-16th century

Abstract

The land survey records made in 1560 in Kleszczele by S. Dziewiałtowski list over 600 owners of plots and land in the town and in the five neighboring villages-suburbs. At that time surnames were comparatively rare, therefore the records usually listed the first name and nicknames of the owner of land. The land survey records of 1560 are the excellent and earliest source of information about anthroponyms of the 16th-century inhabitants of Kleszczele and the surrounding villages, in particular about their first names and nicknames, and about the beginnings of the development of the local surname system. The purpose of the present study is to describe male first-name forms used by the inhabitants of the town of Kleszczele and its suburbs in the mid-16th century. The overwhelming majority were the folk equivalents of Orthodox first names, less often of Catholic ones. These forms developed as a result of transformations in the structure of canonical first names, aiming to adjust them to the language system of the local Ukrainian dialects. The canonical forms of first names, most often originating from Greek, Hebrew and Latin, were usually transformed as a result of far-reaching truncations (initial, medial, and final) and additions of appropriate derivational morphemes. The two procedures were frequently used at the same time.