The Onomastic Picture of a Village in the Polish-Ukrainian Borderland

Abstract

In the article a linguistic analysis has been presented of 307 names, most of them connected with settlements (14 hamlet and over 250 so-called ‘dworzyska’ – farmsteads), and a few dozen ones connected with physiographic objects (rivers, swamps, hills) or with cultural objects (Orthodox churches, inns) from the area of one big village, Kamionka Wołoska, situated near Rawa Ruska. The work is based on the 19^th and 20^th century Polish materials. The colonial-ethnical past of the studied place – that perhaps goes back to the old-Russian times, or to the 15^th-century stage of the Wallachian colonization – determines the fact that the studied names to a high degree – 44% – were formed under the influence of the Ukrainian language. Its features can be seen on the phonetic (Biłuki, Chołody, Hnilce, Hobryny, Struki), morphological (Berezowce, Chocije, Hryńczuki, Panejki) and lexical (Bodnary, Majdan, Popowicze) levels. Names that are genetically Polish constitute about 10%. The others are forms that are neutral, without distinct Polish or Ukrainian features. These proportions cannot be directly transposed to the linguistic-ethnical relations recorded for the 19^th century, when eg. in 1881 in Kamionka 6994 Greek Catholics and only 78 Catholics lived. The overstated numbers for the genetically Polish names can be explained, on the one hand, by the fact that the forms reflect the influence of Polish on Ukrainian not in the local, but supra-local scale, and on the other hand, they may testify to the historical presence of a greater number of Poles on this area, who were later Ruthenized. Apart from these historical-colonial conclusions the study presents the picture of onomastics that informs one about the place’s physiographic and civilization properties and about the semantic-morphotactic patterns of the local names (and indirectly also about the personal ones hidden first of all in the names of family farmsteads) in both the Polish and Ukrainian languages.