Selected Issues in Toponomastic Research. In Search of Old Ruthenian Place Names in the Area of Contemporary Region of Zamość

Abstract

This article presents a variety of methods used in reconstructing a historical map of settlements and place names in a section of the Polish-Ukrainian borderland which covers the area of the contemporary region of Zamość. In the process of reconstructing the map in the tribal period (until the end of the 10th c.) and then in the Old Ruthenian period (until the mid-14th c.), the archaeological method was used, due to the substantial lack of written sources, with only dozen of place names preserved. The use of the archaeological method allowed a reconstruction of the oldest network of settlements and towns, yet not necessarily the place names they had been given originally. The latter can be sought with the greatest chance of success with the use of the philological method, which consists in establishing a metrics of a place name on the basis of their archaic language features: semantic and morphological.